title: Parse a date from unformatted text in SQL
body: <p>I'm trying to figure out an elegant way to get a date from a text column that has data like this "YYYYMMDD"...so we might see "20060508" as a value in the column, which I would like to be able to return from a query as a date (May 8, 2006).</p>
  
  <p>I'm sure I can hack something together given enough time, but the approaches I'm thinking of seem pretty kludgy, and I suspect there's a way this can be elegantly done in a single query.</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions?</p>