What is the CURRENT_DATE or current date value function for SQL Server?

408 Asked by AudreyBerry in SQL Server , Asked on Jul 19, 2021

What is the SQL Server functionality that allows you to get the current date as a DATE type like the SQL Standard's CURRENT_DATE feature? What is the for SQL Server? Using PostgreSQL, I'm looking for something like, SELECT CURRENT_DATE; current_date -------------- 2018-06-27 (1 row)

Answered by Benjamin Moore

  You can use either GETDATE (return type DateTime) or SYSDATETIME (return type datetime2), with the difference being the precision up to nanoseconds for SYSDATETIME().

Example:

  SELECT GETDATE() fn_GetDate, SYSDATETIME() fn_SysDateTime

Results:

fn_GetDate                 fn_SysDateTime

2018-06-27 10:31:18.963    2018-06-27 10:31:18.9659170

See Date and Time Data Types and Functions (Transact-SQL) in the product documentation.

For completeness, SQL Server also recognizes CURRENT_DATE (SQL server today’s date) as mentioned in the question, as an ODBC scalar function:

SELECT {fn CURRENT_DATE()};

This returns varchar(10), so would need an explicit cast or convert to the date data type:

SELECT CONVERT(date, {fn CURRENT_DATE()});

The built-in functions are recommended over ODBC scalar functions.

What is the CURRENT_DATE or current date value function for SQL Server?

Your Answer