Getting a Day Difference in PowerShell–#SQLNewBlogger

Getting a Day Difference in PowerShell–#SQLNewBlogger

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

SSMS froze on me the other day. Actually, it lightly responded to some things, but the window wouldn’t redraw and I couldn’t see the query window. I could see the results pane, but couldn’t get the app to respond.

I wanted to get the difference between two dates, and wasn’t sure, so I quickly searched. I tried assigning the date to a variable, but this creates a string:

$start = “2020-03-11”

With a couple searches, I learned I can use Get-Date to get a date variable. In this case, I’d do this:

$start = Get-Date -Date "2020-03-11"

If I did that with two dates, I could get the difference. Here’s a screen show that shows I get the result in a variety of different time slices.

If I wanted just days, I could do this:

($end - $start).Days

That returns just the 712.

I also learned I could shortcut this with a TimeSpan type.

New-TimeSpan -Start “2020-03-11” -End (Get-Date)

I get the same spread of time parts as the image above, or I can enclose this all in parenthesis and then call the “Days” property to get that value.

SQL NewBlogger

I hadn’t done much with date and time in PoSh, and after seeing an article from an author, I investigated a bit more. This was a part of what I tried to do, albeit as a response to something not working as expected.

Good to know how to work with dates, as I can see this being a part of many PoSh scripts that might clean up old files or otherwise take action based on time values.

You could write this post in about 10-15 minutes and show how you use PoSh to work with date and times.