>Hi John, at sometime I would like to use the % as a wildcard to pickup all dates if when I need to. Also, I have intentionally set lddate to "%". Thanks for your help.

LIKE and % do matching based on strings. This is not going to work with a date field the same as it wouldn't work with a numeric. In fact, you need to consider datetime fields as a kind of numeric. Sometimes they are really awful to work with, especially when you are doing searches on say a last modified field that can have any time component.

The best I can suggest is to change the comparison from a date field to a character field. This may not give you what you want, but you can do this:

SELECT *
FROM dbo.test TEST
WHERE CONVERT(CHAR(20), test.date1, 112) = ?v_date

where v_date has some STRING value that can match the convert string

or

SELECT *
FROM dbo.test TEST
WHERE CONVERT(CHAR(20), test.date1, 112) Like ?v_date

where v_date is also some string date with a % also embedded within.

v_date is your parameter field that is passed to ODBC (where the substitution is made prior to sending the query to SQL Server.