Q:

Getting only day and month from a date field

I have a set of dates that are in the format DD-MMM-YYYY. I need to be able to compare dates by using only the DD-MMM part of the date, since the year isn't important. 
How would I achieve this?
I have tried reading up on the DATEPART function (edit: which evidently wouldn't work) but I can only theoretically get that to return either the DD or the MMM parts, not both of them at once.
Edit: added oracle tag. Sorry.
Example of date field: 01-MAR-1994

A:

If your column is of type DATE then it doesn't have a format.
If I understand you right, then you want to view the mon-dd part only, so you need to convert it with TO_CHAR function,
i.e.:
select to_char(your_date_column, 'mon-dd') from your_table

A:

Convert your dates using the following format, it will only month and the date part. You have to replace getdate() with you date fields.:
  select convert(varchar(5),getdate(),110)

