MS SQL - What day of week is this date?

In MS SQL server, you can use the following two functions to get the day of the week:

DATEPART: It returns an integer representing the day of the week.
DATENAME: It returns the name representing the day of the week.

SELECT DATEPART(dw,GETDATE()) -- 5
SELECT DATENAME(dw,GETDATE()) -- Thursday

These 2 functions can return other kinds of information about a date. You simply have to change the dw abbreviation to something else. Here are the possible abbreviations.

^  Abbreviations  ^  datepart     ^
|  yy, yyyy       |  year         |
|  qq, q          |  quarter      |
|  mm, m          |  month        |
|  dy, y          |  dayofyear    |
|  dd, d          |  day          |
|  wk, ww         |  week         |
|  dw             |  weekday      |
|  hh             |  hour         |
|  mi, n          |  minute       |
|  ss, s          |  second       |
|  ms             |  millisecond  |
|  mcs            |  microsecond  |
|  ns             |  nanosecond   |
|  tz             |  TZoffset     |
|  isowk, isoww   |  ISO_WEEK     |

MS SQL Server

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Xuan Ngo is the founder of OpenWritings.net. He currently lives in Montreal, Canada. He loves to write about programming and open source subjects.