Write SQL queries to perform the following : (I) Display the month (in numeric form) of the date '2026-01-01'.

Question

Q. Write SQL queries to perform the following : (I) Display the month (in numeric form) of the date '2026-01-01'. (II) Display only the year part from the date '2026-01-01'.

CBSECBSE Class XII Board 2026Subjective· 2mImportance★★★★★

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Concept understanding — Date Time Functions

Date Time Functions: A First Look

Think about how often you deal with dates and times in everyday life. You check the date to know when an assignment is due. You look at the clock to see how long you have before a class. You count the days until a holiday. You figure out whether you were born before or after a friend. All of this is about working with dates and times — and that is exactly what date time functions do in a computer program or a spreadsheet.

The Everyday Intuition

Imagine you have a diary. You write down events: "Meeting on 15th March," "Exam on 20th April," "Friend's birthday on 3rd June." Now suppose someone asks you: "How many days until the exam?" or "What day of the week is your birthday?" or "List all events that happen in April." You would flip through your diary, look at the dates, and do a little mental calculation.

A date time function is like having a smart assistant that does all that flipping and calculating for you — instantly and without mistakes. You give it a date or a time, and it can tell you the day of the week, the month, the year, how many days have passed, or even what the date will be after a certain number of days.

The Precise Meaning

A date time function is a built-in tool in software (like Excel, Google Sheets, or a programming language) that lets you extract, manipulate, or calculate information from dates and times. It does not just store a date as text — it understands that "15-03-2025" is a specific point in time, and it can perform operations on it.

Here is what these functions typically let you do:

Extract parts of a date: Get just the year, just the month, or just the day from a full date.
Extract parts of a time: Get the hour, minute, or second from a time value.
Calculate differences: Find out how many days, months, or years are between two dates.
Add or subtract time: Add 10 days to a date, or subtract 3 hours from a time.
Identify the current date and time: Get today's date or the current moment.
Determine the day of the week: Know whether a date falls on a Monday, a Tuesday, and so on.

Note

A date time function treats a date as a number behind the scenes. For example, in many systems, 1 January 1900 is day 1, 2 January 1900 is day 2, and so on. This is why you can add days to a date — you are just adding to that number. You do not need to remember this, but it explains why the computer can do date arithmetic so easily.

Why It Matters

For a commerce or humanities student, date time functions are not about programming — they are about organising and understanding information that is tied to time. Consider these real uses:

A business tracks when invoices were sent and when payments were received. Date functions can automatically calculate how many days a payment is overdue.
A historian records events by date. A date function can sort them in order, find events from a specific decade, or calculate the time gap between two events.
A student keeps a study schedule. A date function can show how many days remain until an exam, or highlight which tasks fall on weekends.
A store analyses sales data. Date functions can group sales by month or by quarter, making it easy to see seasonal trends.

In short, any time you have data that involves dates or times — and in commerce and humanities, you almost always do — date time functions help you make sense of it without doing manual counting or calendar flipping.

Common Date Time Functions at a Glance

Here are the kinds of functions you will encounter, described in plain language:

TODAY() or NOW() — gives you the current date (or date and time). Useful for always having an up-to-date reference.
YEAR(), MONTH(), DAY() — pull out just the year, month, or day from a date. For example, from "15-03-2025" you get 2025, 3, and 15.
HOUR(), MINUTE(), SECOND() — pull out parts of a time value.
DATEDIF() or similar — calculates the difference between two dates in days, months, or years. …

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SQL provides dedicated functions to extract specific components from a date value. These functions are essential for tasks like filtering data based on month or year, or for displaying only a part of a date.

For the given date '2026-01-01':

(I) To display the month in numeric form, we use the MONTH() function. This function takes a date as an argument and returns the month number (1 for January, 2 for February, and so on).

SELECT MONTH('2026-01-01');
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SQL provides specific functions like MONTH() and YEAR() to extract individual components from a date value, simplifying data manipulation.

In the world of databases, dates and times are fundamental data types, but often, we don't need the entire date-time stamp. Instead, we might only be interested in a specific part of it—perhaps just the month for a sales report, or the year for an annual summary. This is where SQL's powerful Date Time Functions come into play. These functions allow us to manipulate, format, and extract specific components from date and time values, making our queries much more flexible and our data analysis more precise.

Let's look at how we can extract the month and year from a given date using standard SQL functions.

(I) Display the month (in numeric form) of the date '2026-01-01'.

To display only the month from a date, SQL offers dedicated functions. A common and straightforward function for this purpose is MONTH(). When you pass a date string or a date column to MONTH(), it returns the numeric representation of the month (1 for January, 2 for February, and so on).

Here is the SQL query to achieve this:

SELECT MONTH('2026-01-01');

Note

While MONTH() is widely supported in many SQL database systems like MySQL and SQL Server, a more ANSI SQL standard way to extract parts of a date is using the EXTRACT() function. For example, SELECT EXTRACT(MONTH FROM '2026-01-01'); would achieve the same result and is often preferred for portability across different database systems.

(II) Display only the year part from the date '2026-01-01'. …

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Same / Similar Concept — real previous-year questions on the same or a closely similar concept, not this exact question.

CBSE 2025Set 90/1/11 markMCQ
$Q. What will be the output of the following SQL command? SELECT MONTHNAME('2024-08-02'); (A) 08 (B) 02 (C) February (D) August$
›Reveal solutionSolution
The SQL function MONTHNAME() returns the full name of the month from a given date, so for '2024-08-02' the output is August.

The MONTHNAME() function is a date-related function in SQL that extracts just the month portion of a date and returns it as a complete English word — not a number, not an abbreviation. Think of it as the opposite of MONTH(), which gives you a numeric value like 8 for August. MONTHNAME() is designed for readability, especially when generating reports or labels where "August" is far clearer than "08".

In the command SELECT MONTHNAME('2024-08-02');, the date string '2024-08-02' is in the standard YYYY-MM-DD format. SQL parses this as the 2nd of August, 2024. The function then looks only at the month component — 08 — and returns its corresponding full name.

Note

The MONTHNAME() function is case-insensitive in most SQL implementations, but the output is typically capitalised (e.g., August, not august). This is consistent with how MySQL and other major databases handle it.

Now, let's examine the options given:

(A) 08 — This would be the output of MONTH(), not MONTHNAME(). A common confusion, but incorrect here. …
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CBSE 2019Set 90/1/11 mark

Q. Consider the following table ‘Transporter’ that stores the order details about items to be transported. Table : TRANSPORTER ORDERNO DRIVERNAME DRIVERGRADE ITEM TRAVELDATE DESTINATION 10012 RAM YADAV A TELEVISION 2019-04-19 MUMBAI 10014 SOMNATH SINGH FURNITURE 2019-01-12 PUNE 10016 MOHAN VERMA B WASHING MACHINE 2019-06-06 LUCKNOW 10018 RISHI SINGH A REFRIGERATOR 2019-04-07 MUMBAI 10019 RADHE MOHAN TELEVISION 2019-05-30 UDAIPUR 10020 BISHEN PRATAP B REFRIGERATOR 2019-05-02 MUMBAI 10021 RAM TELEVISION 2019-05-03 PUNE Write SQL command for the following statement :

ORDERNO	DRIVERNAME	DRIVERGRADE	ITEM	TRAVELDATE	DESTINATION
10012	RAM YADAV	A	TELEVISION	2019-04-19	MUMBAI
10014	SOMNATH SINGH		FURNITURE	2019-01-12	PUNE
10016	MOHAN VERMA	B	WASHING MACHINE	2019-06-06	LUCKNOW
10018	RISHI SINGH	A	REFRIGERATOR	2019-04-07	MUMBAI
10019	RADHE MOHAN		TELEVISION	2019-05-30	UDAIPUR
10020	BISHEN PRATAP	B	REFRIGERATOR	2019-05-02	MUMBAI
10021	RAM		TELEVISION	2019-05-03	PUNE

(v) To display names of drivers, names of items and travel dates for those items that are being transported on or before 1st April 2019.

›Reveal solution

The SQL query uses a WHERE clause with a date comparison to filter rows where TRAVELDATE is on or before 1st April 2019, selecting only DRIVERNAME, ITEM, and TRAVELDATE.

Date and time functions in SQL are essential when you need to work with temporal data — like travel dates, order timestamps, or delivery schedules. In the TRANSPORTER table, the TRAVELDATE column stores dates in the standard SQL format (YYYY-MM-DD), which makes comparisons straightforward. The question asks for drivers, items, and travel dates for orders transported on or before 1st April 2019. This is a classic filtering problem: you need to pick rows where the travel date is less than or equal to a given cutoff.

The key here is understanding how SQL compares dates. Since the dates are stored in a DATE column, you can use the standard comparison operators (<, >, =, <=, >=) directly. The condition "on or before 1st April 2019" translates to TRAVELDATE <= '2019-04-01'. Notice the date is written as a string in single quotes, in the same YYYY-MM-DD format as the stored values. SQL will interpret this correctly because the format matches the default date format.

Now, look at the table. The rows with TRAVELDATE on or before 1st April 2019 are:

Order 10012: 2019-04-19 — this is after 1st April, so it does NOT qualify.
Order 10014: 2019-01-12 — qualifies.
Order 10016: 2019-06-06 — does not qualify.
Order 10018: 2019-04-07 — does not qualify (7th April is after 1st April).
Order 10019: 2019-05-30 — does not qualify.
Order 10020: 2019-05-02 — does not qualify.
Order 10021: 2019-05-03 — does not qualify.

So only one row meets the condition: order 10014, with Somnath Singh, Furniture, and travel date 2019-01-12.

Note

The DRIVERGRADE column has NULL values for some rows (like Somnath Singh), but that does not affect this query because we are not selecting or filtering on that column. …

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Q.Write SQL queries to perform the following : (I) Display the month (in numeric form) of the date '2026-01-01'. (II) Display only the year part from the date '2026-01-01'.

(I) Display the month (in numeric form) of the date '2026-01-01'.

(II) Display only the year part from the date '2026-01-01'. …

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