title: Using SQL Server 2008 Date Data Type to Store Year
body: <p>Does it make any sense to store just a year in the new Date SQL type in SQL 2008?  My boss wanted this but we're prompting the customer to enter year optional in a web form..just 4 integers.  I don't see why we'd use Date datatype as that also includes day and month and I've already got those seperated out into int fields in our DB table.  </p>
  
  <p>Year is optional on our web form, so if they only enter Month and Day, it makese no sense to me to store this in a date type of field because year will have to be something abritrary.  I guess we could do 01-16-1900 if they didn't enter year and then we'd have just day and month..but whatever, to me that's a hack.  I'd rather seperate all 3 into seperate fields only because we have one of those values (year) as optional.  I don't see that we'll ever require year because it's for a birthdate and we already discussed that would piss off customers if we required year anyway.</p>