GETDATE()

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GETDATE()

Greg Snidow

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Points: 16106
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January 8, 2008 at 8:13 am

#62331

Greetings follks. I use the getdate function for countless transactions. It always shows the date, hours, and minutes, but not the seconds. Is there a way to get it to display the seconds? Could it have to do with my datefields, which are all smalldatetime?
Greg
Greg
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The glass is at one half capacity: nothing more, nothing less.

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toniupstny Hall of Fame Points: 3986 More actions · Answer 1

Yes. Smalldatetime only tracks to the minute level

Toni

John Mitchell-245523 SSC Guru Points: 148786 More actions · Answer 2

Could it be to do with your regional settings? What happens if you do SELECT CAST (GETDATE() AS datetime)?

John

Greg Snidow SSCoach Points: 16106 More actions · Answer 3

John Mitchell (1/8/2008)
Could it be to do with your regional settings? What happens if you do SELECT CAST (GETDATE() AS datetime)?
John

If I do that I get seconds and miliseconds. If smalldatetime only tracks to the minute, why are my dates like this '2008-01-08 11:25:00'? It seems to have a place for the seconds, but they are always '00'.

Greg

Greg
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
The glass is at one half capacity: nothing more, nothing less.

Michael Valentine Jones SSC Guru Points: 64818 More actions · Answer 4

Greg Snidow (1/8/2008)
John Mitchell (1/8/2008)
Could it be to do with your regional settings? What happens if you do SELECT CAST (GETDATE() AS datetime)?
John
If I do that I get seconds and miliseconds. If smalldatetime only tracks to the minute, why are my dates like this '2008-01-08 11:25:00'? It seems to have a place for the seconds, but they are always '00'.
Greg

That is just the way it is displayed by Query Analyzer; notice that the minutes are always shown as 00.

Internally, smalldatetime values are stored in a binary format with 2 bytes for the date and 2 bytes for the time. The maximum number of unique values in 2 bytes is 65,536, so that is not enough to hold the 86,400 seconds in a day.

Greg Snidow SSCoach Points: 16106 More actions · Answer 5

Thanks for the info. I guess the extra storage space is not worth having visibility of the seconds for most of my applications.

Greg

Greg
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
The glass is at one half capacity: nothing more, nothing less.

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1000539 More actions · Answer 6

Heh... "It Depends" 😉

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.
"Change is inevitable... change for the better is not".

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