Does anyone know an elegant way to calculate age (to the day)? DateDiff(yyyy, startdate, enddate) doesn't quite work.

Rand

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Rand

 How can I calculate someone's age in SQL Server?

Select CASE
WHEN dateadd(year, datediff (year, d1, d2), d1) > d2
THEN datediff (year, d1, d2) - 1
ELSE datediff (year, d1, d2)
END as Age

Hmm, maybe you can cast both dates to int and then subtract start from end. That should give the number of days difference between them (though it won't be in the form x years, y months, z days - it'll just be t days)

(dates are actually stored as floats, where the int part is the days and the decimal part is the time)

hth
Phil

Actually, that's not true.

DateTime datatypes are stored as a two part integer (hex value, actually). The first part is the (signed) number of days since 1/1/1900, and the second is the number of clock ticks since midnight on that day. A clock tick is 3.33 milliseconds. For the datetime datatype, each part is 4 bytes; for smalldatetime each part is two bytes (and the clock ticks are in minutes, and the number of days is not signed).

You may be thinking of a programming language like VB, where the Date datatype is indeed represented as a floating point number (double). In SQL server, it's not stored that way.

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

Using Northwind Database here is another example


USE northwind
GO
SELECT DATEDIFF(year, BirthDate, getdate()) AS Age
FROM Employees
GO

That won't work, as the original poster observed.

Consider what would happen if you ran your query on, say, Jan 10, 2004, with a value of Nov 21, 2003. The DATEDIFF function would return 1 as an age, which is incorrect. The reason you get a 1 is that the DATEDIFF function counts the number of date boundaries crossed, and for years, the date boundary is Jan 1. So even though the age is only about 2 months, the function would incorrectly report the age as 1 year, since Jan 1 was crossed.

The prior, more complex expression you posted is the correct way, I think.

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

Thank you for point that out, Greatly appreciated.

 I assume then that the smalldatetime will fail (out of range) on June 07, 2079.

Rand

DateDiff is one of those tricky functions that looks simple but isn't.

SELECT DateDiff(dd, '12/31/2003', '01/01/2004') returns 1 (day)
SELECT DateDiff(mm, '12/31/2003', '01/01/2004') also returns 1 (month)
SELECT DateDiff(yyyy, '12/31/2003', '01/01/2004') also returns 1 (year)

Age calculations (to the day) are so common that there should be a built in function AgeOn(DateOfBirth, ReferenceDate) that returns the number of full years that have passed as of the ReferenceDate. I guess I'll have to write that one myself.

Another handy one would be a DateFrac(datetime) function which would return a datetime datatype with the time set to 00:00:00.

And the converse TimeFrac(datetime) function would return a datetime datatype with the date set to 01/01/1900 (day zero).

Thanks, particularly to jemacc and Jeff Mason for the information. I had hoped that there would be a simpler way to calculate age, but NO SUCH LUCK! The code first suggested by jemacc worked - I even modified it to return a -1 if either of the inputs (d1 or d2) was null.

Rand

The small datetime can represent dates through June 6, 2079; any date after that will bomb out with an overflow error.

(I doubt that very many of us will be around to worry about it, though :D )

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