How to calculate age (in years) based on Date of Birth and getDate()

Question

I have a table listing people along with their date of birth (currently a nvarchar(25))

How can I convert that to a date, and then calculate their age in years?

Answer 1

Ed Harper's solution is the simplest I have found which never returns the wrong answer when the month and day of the two dates are 1 or less days apart. I made a slight modification to handle negative ages.

DECLARE @D1 AS DATETIME, @D2 AS DATETIME
SET @D2 = '2012-03-01 10:00:02'
SET @D1 = '2013-03-01 10:00:01'
SELECT
   DATEDIFF(YEAR, @D1,@D2)
   +
   CASE
      WHEN @D1<@D2 AND DATEADD(YEAR, DATEDIFF(YEAR,@D1, @D2), @D1) > @D2
      THEN - 1
      WHEN @D1>@D2 AND DATEADD(YEAR, DATEDIFF(YEAR,@D1, @D2), @D1) < @D2
      THEN 1
      ELSE 0
   END AS AGE