There is a TON to consider when dealing with dates. Still, things don’t have to be too difficult. Once you know the business your code will serve you have to then decide which date format you should use (look at the CONVERT function in books online and you’ll see that you can choose any format from USA with or without the century (mm-dd-yy | mm-dd-yyyy) to ODBC Canonical (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss(24h)) with many in between. The Internet is filled with examples of code that will format date values for you (like the FormatDate function in SQL Server Magazine InstantDoc 96608).

There is a great article that deals with all sorts of date conversions, comparisons and calculations on www.databasejournal.com. This should be right up your alley!