There are many answers to this question, but I think this one is close to the truth.
The datediff(year,…,…) function, as we all know, only counts the boundaries crossed by the date part, in this case the year. As a result it ignores the rest of the year.
This will only give the age in completed years if the year were to start on the birthday. It probably doesn’t, but we can fake it by adjusting the asking date back by the same amount.
In pseudopseudo code, it’s something like this:
adjusted_today = today - month(dob) + 1 - day(dob) + 1
age = year(adjusted_today - dob)
- The
+ 1 is to allow for the fact that the month and day numbers start from 1 and not 0.
- The reason we subtract the month and the day separately rather than the day of the year is because February has the annoying tendency to change its length.
The calculation in SQL is:
datediff(year,dob,dateadd(month,-month(dob)+1,dateadd(day,-day(dob)+1,today)))
where dob and today are presumed to be the date of birth and the asking date.
You can test this as follows:
WITH dates AS (
SELECT
cast('2022-03-01' as date) AS today,
cast('1943-02-25' as date) AS dob
)
select
datediff(year,dob,dateadd(month,-month(dob)+1,dateadd(day,-day(dob)+1,today))) AS age
from dates;
which gives you George Harrison’s age in completed years.
This is much cleaner than fiddling about with quarter days which will generally give you misleading values on the edges.
If you have the luxury of creating a scalar function, you can use something like this:
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS age;
GO
CREATE FUNCTION age(@dob date, @today date) RETURNS INT AS
BEGIN
SET @today = dateadd(month,-month(@dob)+1,@today);
SET @today = dateadd(day,-day(@dob)+1,@today);
RETURN datediff(year,@dob,@today);
END;
GO
Remember, you need to call dbo.age() because, well, Microsoft.