SSIS Source Format Implicit Conversion for Datetime

General Info

These are the default formats of datetimes datatypes (when converting from string)

DT_DBDATE
yyyy-mm-dd

DT_FILETIME
yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss:fff

DT_DBTIME
hh:mm:ss

DT_DBTIME2
hh:mm:ss[.fffffff]

DT_DBTIMESTAMP
yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss[.fff]

DT_DBTIMESTAMP2
yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss[.fffffff]

DT_DBTIMESTAMPOFFSET
yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss[.fffffff] [{+|-} hh:mm]

Note: DT_DATE and DT_DBTIMESTAMP has the same SET method

And i think that converting string to date is depending also on your current culture info

More detailed information are found here

• Integration Services Data Types
• SSIS TO SQL SERVER DATA TYPE TRANSLATIONS

Experiments :

After reading your comment i didn’t find any related article to your question so i made the following experiments:

SSIS Implicit datetime Conversion

i created a SSIS package with a Dataflowtask. in this dataflowtask i created a Script Component (as a Source) and a Flat File Destination. The script has one output column OutDate of type DT_DbTimeStamp Inside the script i used the following code:

Private dtDate As Date = #01/01/2016#

Public Overrides Sub CreateNewOutputRows()

    Output0Buffer.AddRow()


    Using sw As New IO.StreamWriter("D:\Result.txt", False)
        sw.WriteLine("CultureInfo;Date;Format;Accepted")
        sw.Close()
    End Using


    For Each ci As System.Globalization.CultureInfo In System.Globalization.CultureInfo.GetCultures(Globalization.CultureTypes.AllCultures)

        For Each strFormat As String In ci.DateTimeFormat.GetAllDateTimePatterns

            Dim boolResult As Boolean = True
            Try


                Output0Buffer.OutDate = dtDate.ToString(strFormat)

                boolResult = True

            Catch ex As Exception

                boolResult = False



            End Try

            Using sw As New IO.StreamWriter("D:\Result.txt", True)
                sw.WriteLine(ci.Name & ";" & dtDate.ToString(strFormat) & ";" & strFormat & ";" & boolResult.ToString)
                sw.Close()
            End Using

        Next



    Next



End Sub

First i am looping over all culture info and i am Getting all datetime formats related to it and looping over them. Then i am trying to convert the date dtDate declared to a formatted string and assign it to the Output column.

So if assigning string value with specified format to DT_DBTIMESTAMP output column is accepted that means the format is implicit converted

Output0Buffer.OutDate = dtDate.ToString(strFormat)

And Here is the Link of the Result File:

• Result.txt

SQL Server datetime Implicit Conversion

There are two datetime string formats that are interpreted correctly with with any language setting.

yyyyMMdd
yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss    (ISO8601)

Also, you can repeat the same experiment But this time by creating an SqlCommand and executing it:

Dim sqlcmd as new SqlCommand("SELECT CONVERT(DATETIME,'" + dtdate.ToString(strFormat) + '")"

sqlCmd.ExecuteReader()

That way you can if sqlcmd throws an exception it means that format cannot be converted.