SQL has a pretty extensive list of date time functions that come in handy when writing queries. I am going to cover a handful of the most common ones today.

GETDATE()

Getdate() returns the current datetime

select getdate()

Date Parts

use AdventureWorks2012
go

SELECT *
 FROM [AdventureWorks2012].[Sales].[ShoppingCartItem]

First, looking at the data above. The data columns are in a format known as datetime in SQL (you may also hear many refer to it as a time stamp). It contains a date and time. What if you only want the date?

Convert()

SELECT convert(date, ModifiedDate)
 FROM [AdventureWorks2012].[Sales].[ShoppingCartItem]

To select the time only

SELECT convert(time, ModifiedDate)
 FROM [AdventureWorks2012].[Sales].[ShoppingCartItem]

YEAR(), MONTH(), DAY

SELECT year(ModifiedDate) as Year, month(modifieddate) as Month,
day(modifieddate) as day
from sales.SalesOrderDetail

You can filter by date elements too.

SELECT year(ModifiedDate) as Year, month(modifieddate) as Month,
day(modifieddate) as day
from sales.SalesOrderDetail
where day(modifieddate) like '28'

Datepart()

You can extract time elements using Datepart()

SELECT datepart(hour, modifieddate) as hour, datepart(Minute, ModifiedDate) as minute
 FROM [AdventureWorks2012].[Sales].[ShoppingCartItem]

DateAdd()

dateadd() lets you add or subtract days or months or years to a date. In the example below I add 10 days. The syntax is dateadd(interval(d, m, y), amount, date)

select dateadd(d,10,getdate())

DateDiff()

Datediff() gives you the difference between two dates. Look at the dates in the query below:

We want to know how many days difference between DueDate and ModifiedDate

SELECT datediff(d,duedate, ModifiedDate)
 FROM [AdventureWorks2012].[Purchasing].[PurchaseOrderDetail]