Hi

I hope someone can help -

This is where im at -

Im trying to calculate a number between two dates in time.

I have a table of employees with in which I have a field name called datejoined.

My aim is to calculate the number of employees joined within say the last 2 days.

Here is my code

SELECT count(*) FROM Userdetails WHERE datejoined between convert(varchar(10),getdate()-2,103) and convert(varchar(10),getdate(),103)

This should return all employees joined between 03/09/2006 and 05/09/2006
When I run this today which is on the 5th it returns all counts for dates which have 05, 04, and 03 as the day - and it will return any month! ie it will happily return numbers for employees who joined on 05/06/2006.

Im conpletely stuck with this, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Tim

Why are you doing your BETWEEN test on varchar strings?

Since your comparison is using strings, the selection is based on string values, and not dates, so it's doing the 'right' thing for the datatypes involved.

Is the datatype of the 'datejoined' column a varchar? Why?

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com

The datejoined field is datetime -

The way I understood it was that getdate() which I need to use to pin point my two dates in time has the format dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss so I used the convert to trim the getdate() to just dd/mm/yy.

If this is my problem - how can I compare using datetime and not string values?

Hi.

You could do like this:

select cast(convert(varchar,getdate()-2,103 ) as datetime)

Gert

GetDate() doesn't have a format. The function returns a value of type datetime. Thus you can compare it directly to other datetime values.

Datetime value may have a default format - like dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss which will be used when converting a datetime to a character string (you can override and/or change this), but if all your expressions are using datetime datatypes, then the string format has nothing to do with it.

Also, you'll be better off in the long run to use the date manipulation functions, like DATEADD, to modify datetime values, rather than directly subtracting, as:

    ...WHERE datejoined BETWEEN DATEADD(d, -2, GetDate()) AND GetDate()

Also, be careful of the time portion of a datetime. A datetime always contains a time portion as well as a date, so you must take care to account for that in your comparisons.

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com

That worked a treat - thanks for a your help and time!

Another way to handle that is as follows:

Convert the string back to a datetime
CAST(convert(varchar(10),getdate()-2,103) AS Datetime)

SELECT count(*) FROM Userdetails WHERE datejoined between CAST(convert(varchar(10),getdate()-2,103) AS datetime) and CAST(convert(varchar(10),getdate(),103) AS datetime)


Rand

Jeff:

If you ran your code at 1:00pm, it would ignore any records dated 2006.09.03 but prior to 1:00pm.

Is that what the user really wants?


Rand

Sadly, there isn't a built in function which will return only the date part of a datetime as a datetime. ie. '2006.09.05 13:15:30.123' becomes '2006.09.05 00:00:00.000'.


Rand