Convert date in snowflake to YYYYMM

Snowflake documentation says to use TO_DATE('2022-01-01', 'YYYYMM'), however, when running that I receive the error message:

"Error: too many arguments for function [TO_DATE("policy_effective_date", 'YYYYMM')] expected 1, got 2"

Any help is appreciated.

I was expecting to see 2022-01-01 turn into 202201. Even if I need to bring in DD that's fine too, I can just capture the LEFT 6 digits, but regardless the system is saying it's too many arguments.

1 Answer

TO_DATE() function accepts string/varchar format date and converts to Date Data type. For that we need to pass existing String date type format to parse. To Convert to the required format we need to use to_varchar as given in the documentation.