When do I need to cast a value as a date? - postgresql

Question

I'm working myself through the Datacamp SQL track, and I'm currently working with date values. I've encountered two examples which seem contradictory to me.
-- Count requests created on January 31, 2017
SELECT count(*)
FROM evanston311
WHERE date_created::date='2017-01-31';
And:
-- Count requests created on February 29, 2016
SELECT count(*)
FROM evanston311
WHERE date_created>= '2016-02-29'
AND date_created< '2016-03-01';
Why do I need to cast the value as date in the first case but not the other?

Answer 1

As with most typed languages, you can rely on implicit type casting... until you can't.
Something like date_created >= '2016-02-29' Postgres can use the type of date_created to figure out how to implicitly cast '2016-02-29'. There's no ambiguity. But sometimes Postgres can't make a guess at all.
OTOH a function like date_part has multiple signatures date_part(text, timestamp) and date_part(text, interval). If you pass it a date string...
test=# select date_part('day', '2019-01-03');
ERROR: function date_part(unknown, unknown) is not unique
LINE 1: select date_part('day', '2019-01-03');
^
HINT: Could not choose a best candidate function. You might need to add explicit type casts.
...Postgres cannot make a guess because the second string could be interpreted as either a timestamp or an interval type. You need to resolve this ambiguity.
# select date_part('day', '2019-01-03'::date);
date_part
-----------
3
Now that Postgres knows you're passing in a date it can correctly guess to use it as a timestamp.
Another reason is as a cheap way to truncate timestamps. In your example date_created::date = '2017-01-31' will truncate date_created to be a date and make the comparison work. Of course, date_created should already be a date...
You can use it on the value being compared if you're not sure if that value will be a date or a timestamp.
select * from table
where date_created = $1::date
This will work the same with '2019-01-02' or '2019-01-02 03:04:05'.
Which brings us to our final reason: making up for bad schemas. Like if date_created is actually a timestamp, or all too common, text. In that case you need to explicitly control how comparisons are made. For example, let's say we had text_created of type text that contained timestamps as strings: naught. And maybe some poorly formatted data crept in that has extra spaces on the end...
-- Text comparison compares the values exactly.
test=# select * from test where text_created = '2019-01-04';
date_created | time_created | text_created
--------------+--------------+--------------
-- Date comparison compares as dates ignoring the extra whitespace.
test=# select * from test where text_created::date = '2019-01-04';
date_created | time_created | text_created
--------------+--------------+--------------
| | 2019-01-04
See Chapter 10. Type Conversion in the Postgres docs for more.