The SQL Server adapter for ActiveRecord uses Time objects to cast dates from the db. This fails for dates before 1970, thus some birthdates come back as nil. This is some kludge to use a DateTime in that case so we still get the value.

A better approach may be to convert this code to use DateTime objects exclusively, but I'm not sure of the speed implications of doing so. The code below first tries to cast the value to a Time object; if that fails, it tries a DateTime object; if that fails, it returns nil.

Stick this in a plugin to use with Rails.

module ActiveRecord
  module ConnectionAdapters
    class ColumnWithIdentity
      def cast_to_time(value)
        return value if value.is_a?(Time) or value.is_a?(DateTime)
        time_array = ParseDate.parsedate(value)
        time_array[0] ||= 2000
        time_array[1] ||= 1
        time_array[2] ||= 1
        Time.send(Base.default_timezone, *time_array) rescue DateTime.new(*time_array[0..5]) rescue nil
      end
      def cast_to_datetime(value)
        if value.is_a?(Time) or value.is_a?(DateTime)
          if value.year != 0 and value.month != 0 and value.day != 0
            return value
          else
            return Time.mktime(2000, 1, 1, value.hour, value.min, value.sec) rescue nil
          end
        end
        return cast_to_time(value) if value.is_a?(Date) or value.is_a?(String) rescue nil
        value
      end
    end
  end
end