I really like it when an application presents dates in a friendly “n Hours Ago” format. Mostly because I’m lazy and hate to do extra brain-work. John Resig created “pretty date” and it’s insanely useful. It also plugs into JQuery very easily.

But on the project I am working on it made more sense to provide this functionality within the database. So I created a pretty date function for SQL.

[sourcecode language="SQL"]
CREATE FUNCTION dbo.GetFriendlyDateTimeValue
(
@CompareDate DateTime
)
RETURNS nvarchar( 48 )
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @Now DateTime
DECLARE @Hours int
DECLARE @Suff nvarchar(256)
DECLARE @Found bit

SET @Found = 0
SET @Now = getDate()
SET @Hours = DATEDIFF(MI, @CompareDate, @Now)/60

IF @Hours <= 1
BEGIN
SET @Suff = 'Just Now'
SET @Found = 1
RETURN @Suff
END

IF @Hours < 24
BEGIN
SET @Suff = ' Hours Ago'
SET @Found = 1
END

IF @Hours >= 8760 AND @Found = 0
BEGIN
SET @Hours = @Hours / 8760
SET @Suff = ‘ Years Ago’
SET @Found = 1
END

IF @Hours >= 720 AND @Found = 0
BEGIN
SET @Hours = @Hours / 720
SET @Suff = ‘ Months Ago’
SET @Found = 1
END

IF @Hours >= 168 AND @Found = 0
BEGIN
SET @Hours = @Hours / 168
SET @Suff = ‘ Weeks Ago’
SET @Found = 1
END

IF @Hours >= 24 AND @Found = 0
BEGIN
SET @Hours = @Hours / 24
SET @Suff = ‘ Days Ago’
SET @Found = 1
END

RETURN Convert(nvarchar, @Hours) + @Suff

END
[/sourcecode]

dates · SQL