Handling invalid dates

Time Series Analysis in SQL Server

Maham Faisal Khan

Senior Data Science Content Developer

Error-safe date conversion functions

SELECT
    PARSE('01/08/2019' AS DATE USING 'en-us') AS January8US,
    PARSE('01/08/2019' AS DATE USING 'fr-fr') AS August1FR;
GO

Results:

January8US	August1FR
2019-01-08	2019-08-01

SELECT
    PARSE('01/13/2019' AS DATE USING 'en-us') AS January13US,
    PARSE('01/13/2019' AS DATE USING 'fr-fr') AS Smarch1FR;
GO

**Msg 9819, Level 16, State 1, Line 1**

Error converting string value '01/13/2019' into data type date using culture 'fr-fr'.

SELECT
    TRY_PARSE('01/13/2019' AS DATE USING 'en-us') AS January13US,
    TRY_PARSE('01/13/2019' AS DATE USING 'fr-fr') AS Smarch1FR;
GO

January13US	Smarch1FR
2019-01-13	NULL

Using safe methods is no more expensive than using unsafe methods.

CAST() and CONVERT() functions run at approximately the same speed.

PARSE() functions are much slower than CAST() and CONVERT().

These are per-second measures, which means they scale linearly.

Time Series Analysis in SQL Server