Convert datetime stored as char the YYYMMDDHHmmSS format to datetime I'm working with a table where the date and time of an event is stored as a char in the format YYYMMDDHHmmSS or '20120606122012'. I need to compare this to the current timestamp to see if it's been more than 20 minutes since the event happened, but that seems to be more difficult than I anticipated.

Is it possible to do this, or if not: is there a different approach that works?
Do some string manipulation to get your string to the format YYYYMMDD HH:mm:SS and you can cast/convert to datetime.  

Something like this:

declare @S varchar(50)
set @S = '20120606122012'

select cast(left(@S, 8)+' '+substring(@S, 9, 2)+':'+substring(@S, 11, 2)+':'+substring(@S, 13, 2) as datetime)