# Using FORMAT_DATE in BigQuery

The code we write daily as Data Engineers is not necessarily complicated.

We're solving a lot of problems like the following:

Given a schedule per day of the week (Monday hours are 10:00 - 22:00 / 10 am - 10 pm), find out what was the schedule for a list of calendar days.

Here's how a BigQuery solution could look like:  
\- using FORMAT\_DATE we can extract the abbreviated week day (%a in the list of format elements for date and time parts, attached in comments)  
\- transform that match casing of the joined column  
\- (INNER) JOIN

How would your solution to such a problem look like?

![](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*hcqI67_VNRky8qKr align="left")

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