Date Difference in Years, Months and Days in SQL Server

Recently, I had a requirement where I had to calculate the difference in Year(s), Months(s) and Day(s) between the two dates. Unfortunately there is no in-function in SQL Server to calculate the same. So, I wrote a user-defined function for this and thought of sharing the same on my blog. So, in this post, we will see how to calculate Date difference in Years, Months and dates between two dates.

SQL Server has in-built function DATEDIFF to find the difference between two dates, but, it works only on DATEPART provided in the first parameter of the function.

Let's take a look how it works

DECLARE @date1 DATETIME, @date2 DATETIME
SET @date1='12/31/2010'
SET @date2='01/01/2011'
SELECT    datediff(YEAR,@date1,@date2) as years
        , datediff(MONTH,@date1,@date2) as months
        , datediff(DAY,@date1,@date2) as days

OUTPUT

The actual difference between the two dates in only 1 day but look at the output it returns 1 year, 1 month and 1 day, which is incorrect as per our requirement. As per our requirement, it should be 0 year, 0 month and 1 day.

As a solution to above, I have created a user defined function to find the exact date difference in Year(s), Month(s) and Day(s) between two dates.

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[udfDateDiffinYrMonDay] (@datefrom DATETIME, @dateto DATETIME)
RETURNS VARCHAR(MAX)
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @Years INT, @Months INT, @Days INT
    SET @Years = DATEDIFF(YEAR, @datefrom, @dateto)
    IF DATEADD(YY, @Years, @datefrom) > @dateto
    BEGIN
        SET @Years = @Years - 1
    END

    SET @datefrom = DATEADD(YY, @Years, @datefrom)
    SET @Months = DATEDIFF(MM, @datefrom, @dateto)

    IF DATEADD(MM, @Months, @datefrom) > @dateto
    BEGIN
        SET @Months = @Months - 1
    END

    SET @datefrom = DATEADD(MM, @Months, @datefrom)
    SET @Days = DATEDIFF(DD, @datefrom, @dateto)

    RETURN CAST(@Years AS VARCHAR) + ' Years '
            + CAST(@Months AS VARCHAR) + ' Months '
            + CAST(@Days AS VARCHAR) + ' Days'
END

Let's test the above created function

SELECT dbo.udfDateDiffinYrMonDay('12/31/2010','01/01/2011')

OUTPUT

SELECT dbo.udfDateDiffinYrMonDay('06/08/2006','01/01/2011')

OUTPUT

Related post: calculate date difference in Year(s), Month(s) and Day(s) in C#