T-SQL formatting Dates and Times using FORMAT

By Mark Wills

Formatting dates and times has aways presented a few challenges in T-SQL. Seems most other languages support a FORMAT command.

Well, time to rejoice because (finally) MS SQL 2012 (and more recent) now supports the FORMAT function. One little "gotcha" is you need .Net Framework because it leverages CLR. Which also means that it cannot be remoted (which is nothing new for CLR runtime).

So, with that out of the way, and for a large majority of T-SQL requirements, it is like any other system function. Probably easiest to show you :)

First, some dummy data. Create an order table with date and price columns, then populate :-

CREATE TABLE EE_tbl_Orders (CUSTOMER varchar(20),ORDER_DATE datetime, ORDER_PRICE decimal(10,4));
                      
                      
                      INSERT INTO EE_tbl_Orders (CUSTOMER, ORDER_DATE, ORDER_PRICE) VALUES ('Fred','2015-08-20 20:30:40',1234.5678);

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The structre of the command is FORMAT ( value, format_str [], culture ] ) and can be found at MSDN Now, [culture] is optional and I tend to leave it out so it can default to the way my server / systems are set up.

So, with our Order Table, let us experiment with our new command...

SELECT Customer, FORMAT(Order_Date,'yyyy MMM dd'), Order_Price
                      FROM EE_tbl_Orders
                      
                      
                      -- Results
                      
                      -- Fred      2015 Aug 20      1234.5678

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Now, we can also do something with that price as well (and note the rounding)...

SELECT Customer, FORMAT(Order_Date,'yyyy MMM dd'), FORMAT(Order_Price,'C')
                      FROM EE_tbl_Orders
                       
                      -- Results
                      -- Fred      2015 Aug 20      $1,234.57

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Makes it a LOT easier, especially if you are familiar with format codes from other languages. Basically, the format characters in the format_str is one of d", "f", "F", "g", "h", "H", "K", "m", "M", "s", "t", "y", "z", ":", or "/" and known as a format specifier. Any other character will show as is. If you want the result to contain one of those characters, you have to use the backslash "\" as an escape character (including for its own use where you want a backslash).

For example date delimiters... Including a hyphen just needs to be there, but a forward slash needs to be 'escaped' with a backslash first :

SELECT Customer, FORMAT(Order_Date,'yyyy-MMM-dd'), FORMAT(Order_Date,'yyyy\/MMM\/dd'), FORMAT(Order_Price,'C')
                      FROM EE_tbl_Orders
                       
                      -- Results
                      -- Fred      2015-Aug-20      2015/Aug/20      $1,234.57

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There is now a significant function (finally) available to us T-SQL programmers. We can get pretty sophisticated such as FORMAT(Order_Date,'"Ordered On "yyyy-MMM-dd') including a double quoted string. But that is probably another Article.

Well, hope I have been able to share something new in T-SQL 2012. Please vote "Good Article" below.