My first suggestion would be to fix the data type. There is absolutely no reason I can fathom that this single value should be stored with all that extra XML fluff around it. Leave the presentation stuff to the presentation tier.
Given that you are seemingly stuck with it for now, I would use ISO 8601 (the first option). Why?
Using
mm/dd/yyyy
(your option 2) is prone to misinterpretation in various ways, for example if you had05/06/2013
how will I know if that's May 6th or June 5th? Will all of your audience like the same date format you chose? Do you even know? In fact to pinpoint why this is a problem, I don't even know if you meantmm/dd/yyyy
ordd/mm/yyyy
.The unseparated format is slightly more cumbersome to read, especially when you have dates with consecutive characters, e.g.
20110110
. The dashes can be a great visual separator, just don't ever forget the T:SET LANGUAGE FRENCH; SELECT CONVERT(DATETIME, '2013-05-06 13:30:30');
Result (June 5th!):
2013-06-05