Midnight 12:00am or 12:00pm

[NotAllThere]

Which is it?

I think the former

[PAH]

So does 11pm come before or after midnight.

[Spacecadet]

Which is it?

I think the former

I've always thought it was 12am

SQL Server treats it as AM:


select convert(varchar, cast('20080101' as datetime), 109)
Jan 1 2008 12:00:00:000AM

[Spacecadet]

So does 11pm come before or after midnight.

after

12 midnight = 00:00 hours and is the start of a new day

[PAH]

I've always thought it was 12am

SQL Server treats it as AM:


select convert(varchar, cast('20080101' as datetime), 109)
Jan 1 2008 12:00:00:000AM

Then it's wrong. Midnight cannot be after midnight. It's 12pm, everything else is illogical. Spock will back me up...

[ASB]

Neither. It's 12 noon or 12 midnight. If you must choose it's AM since it's 00.00 not 24:00 and it's the start of a new day.

[Sockpuppet]

I just use 00:00

AM/PM is therefore not relevant.

[NickFitz]

Neither. It's 12 noon or 12 midnight. If you must choose it's AM since it's 00.00 not 24:00 and it's the start of a new day.

WHS.

[ThomasSoerensen]

24:00:00

[NotAllThere]

Since an instance in time lasts only an instance (or possibly 5.39121 x 10^-44 seconds), it's never (or only extremely briefly) exactly midnight. Therefore any time you're likely to measure is either before midnight (up to 23:59:59.999999999999999999 ) or after (from 00:00:00:000...001). So it should be 12:00am.

I think the convention is that is 12:00am - which is the consensus here. If that causes problems then use the 24 hour clock. According to wikipedia (yeah yeah) 24:00 is ok.