Convert varchar to datetime in sql which is having millisec

Question

I have a column abc varchar(100) with data like 2011-09-26 16:36:57.810000

I want to convert this column to DATETIME...

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Answer 1

You can use style 121 but you can have only 3 digits for milliseconds (i.e yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss.mmm(24h)) format.

declare @abc varchar(100)='2011-09-26 16:36:57.810' 
select convert(datetime,@abc,121)

So you can sort it out by limiting the varchar field to 23 characters before converting as:

declare @abc varchar(100)='2011-09-26 16:36:57.810000' 
select convert(datetime,convert(varchar(23),@abc),121)

Or use the Left() function to get first 23 characters as:

select convert(datetime,left(@abc,23),121)

Try to avoid storing date as string.