SQL SELECT Previous MMYY as varchar(4)

Question

Dearest genius StackOverflow friends,

I\'m in the need of creating a view that will always give me data in the WHERE clause for \"Period\" looking for the previous M

Answer 1

Use this:

;WITH PrevMonth AS (
   SELECT LEFT(REPLACE(CONVERT(date, DATEADD(m, -1, getdate())), '-', ''), 6) AS YYYYMM
)
SELECT SUBSTRING(YYYYMM, 5, 2) + SUBSTRING(YYYYMM, 3, 2) AS MMYY 
FROM PrevMonth  

The CTE yields the date of previous month in YYYYMM format. Using SUBSTRING the format is rearranged to produce the required output.

If you are using SQL Server 2012+ it's a lot easier to get the desired result using FORMAT:

SELECT FORMAT(DATEADD(m, -1, getdate()), 'MMyy') AS MMYY