Best approach to remove time part of datetime in S

Question

Which method provides the best performance when removing the time portion from a datetime field in SQL Server?

a) select DATEADD(dd, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, getdate()), 0)

or

b) select cast(convert(char(11), getdate(), 113) as datetime)

The second method does send a few more bytes either way but that might not be as important as the speed of the conversion.

Both also appear to be very fast, but there might be a difference in speed when dealing with hundreds-of-thousands or more rows?

Also, is it possible that there are even better methods to get rid of the time portion of a datetime in SQL?

Answer 1

SELECT CAST(CAST(GETDATE() AS DATE) AS DATETIME)

Answer 2

If possible, for special things like this, I like to use CLR functions.

In this case:

[Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction]
    public static SqlDateTime DateOnly(SqlDateTime input)
    {
        if (!input.IsNull)
        {
            SqlDateTime dt = new SqlDateTime(input.Value.Year, input.Value.Month, input.Value.Day, 0, 0, 0);

            return dt;
        }
        else
            return SqlDateTime.Null;
    }

Answer 3

BEWARE!

Method a) and b) does NOT always have the same output!

select DATEADD(dd, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, '2013-12-31 23:59:59.999'), 0)

Output: 2014-01-01 00:00:00.000

select cast(convert(char(11), '2013-12-31 23:59:59.999', 113) as datetime)

Output: 2013-12-31 00:00:00.000

(Tested on MS SQL Server 2005 and 2008 R2)

EDIT: According to Adam's comment, this cannot happen if you read the date value from the table, but it can happen if you provide your date value as a literal (example: as a parameter of a stored procedure called via ADO.NET).

Answer 4

Of-course this is an old thread but to make it complete.

From SQL 2008 you can use DATE datatype so you can simply do:

SELECT CONVERT(DATE,GETDATE())

Answer 5

CAST(round(cast(getdate()as real),0,1) AS datetime)

This method does not use string function. Date is basically a real datatype with digits before decimal are fraction of a day.

this I guess will be faster than a lot.

Answer 6

I would use:

CAST
(
CAST(YEAR(DATEFIELD) as varchar(4)) + '/' CAST(MM(DATEFIELD) as varchar(2)) + '/' CAST(DD(DATEFIELD) as varchar(2)) as datetime
) 

Thus effectively creating a new field from the date field you already have.