SET LANGUAGE example: Month name in Polish

Code example of SET LANGUAGE

Analytics Platform System (PDW)

Use caution when allowing conversion of your CHARACTER strings into DATE data types. The reason is that such conversions are often

nondeterministic.

You control these nondeterministic conversions by accounting for the settings of SET

LANGUAGE

and

SET DATEFORMAT.

A character string can be the name of a month. But is the name in English, or Polish, or

Croatian, or in another language? And, will the user’s session be set to the correct corresponding LANGUAGE?

For example, consider the word listopad

, which is the name of a month. But which month it is depends on the language the SQL system believes is being used: If Polish, then listopad

translates to month 11 (

November

in English).

If Croatian, then listopad

translates to month 10 (

October

in English).

dmy mdy

ymd ymd

ydm dmy

‘dd-mm-yyyy’ dmy

mdy

SET LANGUAGE Polish;

--SELECT alias FROM sys.syslanguages ORDER BY alias;
DECLARE
@yourInputDate
NVARCHAR (32) =
'28 listopad 2018'
;
SET
LANGUAGE
Polish;
SELECT
CONVERT (
DATE
, @yourInputDate)
AS
[SL_Polish];
SET
LANGUAGE
Croatian;
SELECT
CONVERT (
DATE
, @yourInputDate)
AS
[SL_Croatian];
SET
LANGUAGE
English;
/*** Actual output: For the two months, note the 11 versus the 10.