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Comparing dates in search conditions

You can use operators other than equals to select a set of rows that satisfy the search condition. The inequality operators (< and >) can be used to compare numbers, dates, and even character strings.

List all employees born before March 13, 1964

• In Interactive SQL, execute the following query:

  SELECT Surname, BirthDate
     FROM Employees
     WHERE BirthDate < 'March 13, 1964'
     ORDER BY BirthDate DESC;

  Surname	BirthDate
  Ahmed	1963-12-12
  Dill	1963-07-19
  Rebeiro	1963-04-12
  Garcia	1963-01-23
  Pastor	1962-07-14
  ...	...

Notes

• Automatic conversion to dates    The SQL Anywhere database server knows that the BirthDate column contains dates, and automatically converts the string 'March 13, 1964' to a date.

• Ways of specifying dates    There are many ways of specifying dates. The following are all accepted by SQL Anywhere:

  'March 13, 1964'
  '1964/03/13'
  '1964-03-13'

  You can tune the interpretation of dates in queries by setting a database option. Dates in the format yyyy/mm/dd or yyyy-mm-dd are always recognized unambiguously as dates, regardless of the date_order setting.

  For more information on controlling allowable date formats in queries, see date_order option [compatibility], and Setting options.

• Other comparison operators    SQL Anywhere supports several comparison operators.

  For a complete list of available comparison operators, see Comparison operators.