What is the CURRENT_DATE or current date value function for SQL Server?

What is the SQL Server functionality that allows you to get the current date as a DATE type like the SQL Standard's CURRENT_DATE feature. What is the `` for SQL Server?

Using PostgreSQL, I'm looking for something like,

SELECT CURRENT_DATE;
 current_date 
--------------
 2018-06-27
(1 row)

You can use either GETDATE (return type datetime) or SYSDATETIME (return type datetime2), with the difference being the precision up to nanoseconds for SYSDATETIME().

Example:

SELECT GETDATE() fn_GetDate, SYSDATETIME() fn_SysDateTime

Results:

fn_GetDate fn_SysDateTime
2018-06-27 10:31:18.963 2018-06-27 10:31:18.9659170

See Date and Time Data Types and Functions (Transact-SQL) in the product documentation.

For completeness, SQL Server also recognises CURRENT_DATE as mentioned in the question, as an ODBC scalar function:

SELECT {fn CURRENT_DATE()};

This returns varchar(10), so would need an explicit cast or convert to the date data type:

SELECT CONVERT(date, {fn CURRENT_DATE()});

The built-in functions are recommended over ODBC scalar functions.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#210683, answer score: 9