Returns the name of the specified part (such as the month “June”) of a date/time value, as a character string.
DATENAME ( date-part, date-expression )
date-part The date part to be named.
For a complete listing of allowed date parts, see “Date parts”.
date-expression The date for which the date part name is to be returned. The date must contain the requested date-part.
The following statement returns the value May:
SELECT datename( month , '1987/05/02' ) FROM iq_dummy
DATENAME returns a character string, even if the result is numeric, such as 23, for the day.