>I would like to return only the full date portion of this field.

SQL Server only has a datetime datatype. You will always have a time componenet.

DECLARE @d datetime
SET @d = '20030429'
SELECT @d

You see that the time component is set to 12:00am

>When I perform a search on this field... if I look for 04/11/2003 will I get the appropriate row?

Since there is only a date, SQL Server will default the time component to 12:00am. The only rows that will be matched are those who's value is set to 4/11/2003 12:00am.

I perfer to use the following when searching on dates:

datetimecolumn >= '20030411' and datetimecolumn < '20030412'

-Mike