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Date comparisons

When working with timestamps, sometimes you want to find all observations on a given day. However, if you specify only a date in a comparison, you may get unexpected results. This query:

SELECT count(*) 
  FROM evanston311
 WHERE date_created = '2018-01-02';

returns 0, even though there were 49 requests on January 2, 2018.

This is because dates are automatically converted to timestamps when compared to a timestamp. The time fields are all set to zero:

SELECT '2018-01-02'::timestamp;
 2018-01-02 00:00:00

When working with both timestamps and dates, you'll need to keep this in mind.

This exercise is part of the course

Exploratory Data Analysis in SQL

View Course

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

-- Count requests created on January 31, 2017
SELECT count(*) 
  FROM evanston311
 WHERE ___;
Edit and Run Code