Welcome to the Ranch.
If the date string looks like this: "2011-09-28 00:00:00.0", then the format for parsing could be something like this: "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"
Note: HH instead of hh for 24-hour values (00-23) instead of 12-hour values. I'm ignoring the last ".0" (tenths of a second?) here. Unfortunately,
Java's SimpleDateFormat does not support parsing tenths of a second (it only supports milliseconds) - as far as I know.
Your code for converting it to a java.sql.Date is unnecessarily complicated. You format it again using another DateFormat object and then create a java.sql.Date out of that formatted string. A better way, if you have a java.util.Date and need a java.sql.Date, is this: