Sometimes it is interesting to know number of edits/posts/votes/something per day/month. For example, when some changes in various trends are discussed on meta.

When I tried to do something like that, I have used STR(Year(CreationDate))+'-'+STR(Month(CreationDate))+'-'+STR(Day(CreationDate))‌​ or something similar.

For example: Edits by a specific user per day or Number of questions per month.

Are there some other ways to do this? Was my attempt very cumbersome?

@Martin to group by day can be achieved by casting (or converting) a datetime to a date type, so group by cast(creationdate as date). The date type doesn't allow for a time component so it will simply drop that from the datetime values. For month there isn't such trick, but you don't need to convert to str and concat. A group by yesr(creationdate), month(creationdate) will work.

You might like the format function: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/… it allows you to format the values from several types into a varchar using the .Net composite string formatting options. Select format(getdate(), 'yyyy-MM' ) gives you 2018-08 in one go.

Thanks, that is useful to know.

I found an example of such query here: Comments per Day. (Number of comments per day for a specific user.)

I have to admit that basically all I learned about SQL was by looking at some queries posted here, (It is certainly not and ideal approach to learn, but probably sufficient for some simple queries.)