Ever wanted to know how many people are actively posting something on a Monday? Or maybe during the weekends?

You can do that by using the DATEPART and DATENAME functions. Let me show you how they work.

Using DATEPART

The DATEPART function represents weekdays as integers from 1 (Sunday) to 7 (Saturday).

Let's say that you wanted to filter between Monday and Friday, you can achieve something like this:

SELECT * FROM dbo.YourTable WHERE DATEPART(WEEKDAY, YourDateColumn) BETWEEN 2 and 6;

One thing to note, in SQL Server, Sunday is the first day of the week. So, if you wanted to set the first day of the week, you can write the following statement before executing your query:

SET DATEFIRST 1;  -- Set Monday as the first day of the week
SELECT * FROM dbo.YourTable WHERE DATEPART(WEEKDAY, YourDateColumn) BETWEEN 1 and 5;

In the example above, you'll achieve the same results as the previous one.

Using DATENAME

The DATENAME function represents weekdays as a string from Monday to Sunday.

Let's replicate the previous example using this function:

SELECT * FROM dbo.YourTable WHERE DATENAME(WEEKDAY, YourDateColumn) IN ('Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday');

If you want to know more about filtering your records effectively using these methods, you can the read the documentation:

• DATENAME (Transact-SQL)
• DATEPART (Transact-SQL)

Hope you found this tip useful!