That's the hard way, and those java.util.Date setter methods have been deprecated since Java 1.1 (1997). Moreover, the whole java.util.Date class was de-facto deprecated (discommended) since introduction of java.time API in Java 8 (2014).

Simply format the date using DateTimeFormatter with a pattern matching the input string (the tutorial is available here).

In your specific case of "January 2, 2010" as the input string:

1. "January" is the full text month, so use the MMMM pattern for it
2. "2" is the short day-of-month, so use the d pattern for it.
3. "2010" is the 4-digit year, so use the yyyy pattern for it.

String string = "January 2, 2010";
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("MMMM d, yyyy", Locale.ENGLISH);
LocalDate date = LocalDate.parse(string, formatter);
System.out.println(date); // 2010-01-02

Note: if your format pattern happens to contain the time part as well, then use LocalDateTime#parse(text, formatter) instead of LocalDate#parse(text, formatter). And, if your format pattern happens to contain the time zone as well, then use ZonedDateTime#parse(text, formatter) instead.

Here's an extract of relevance from the javadoc, listing all available format patterns:

Do note that it has several predefined formatters for the more popular patterns. So instead of e.g. DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z", Locale.ENGLISH);, you could use DateTimeFormatter.RFC_1123_DATE_TIME. This is possible because they are, on the contrary to SimpleDateFormat, thread safe. You could thus also define your own, if necessary.

For a particular input string format, you don't need to use an explicit DateTimeFormatter: a standard ISO 8601 date, like 2016-09-26T17:44:57Z, can be parsed directly with LocalDateTime#parse(text) as it already uses the ISO_LOCAL_DATE_TIME formatter. Similarly, LocalDate#parse(text) parses an ISO date without the time component (see ISO_LOCAL_DATE), and ZonedDateTime#parse(text) parses an ISO date with an offset and time zone added (see ISO_ZONED_DATE_TIME).

Pre-Java 8

In case you're not on Java 8 yet, or are forced to use java.util.Date, then format the date using SimpleDateFormat using a format pattern matching the input string.

String string = "January 2, 2010";
DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("MMMM d, yyyy", Locale.ENGLISH);
Date date = format.parse(string);
System.out.println(date); // Sat Jan 02 00:00:00 GMT 2010

Note the importance of the explicit Locale argument. If you omit it, then it will use the default locale which is not necessarily English as used in the month name of the input string. If the locale doesn't match with the input string, then you would confusingly get a java.text.ParseException even though when the format pattern seems valid.

Here's an extract of relevance from the javadoc, listing all available format patterns:

Note that the patterns are case sensitive and that text based patterns of four characters or more represent the full form; otherwise a short or abbreviated form is used if available. So e.g. MMMMM or more is unnecessary.

Here are some examples of valid SimpleDateFormat patterns to parse a given string to date:

An important note is that SimpleDateFormat is not thread safe. In other words, you should never declare and assign it as a static or instance variable and then reuse it from different methods/threads. You should always create it brand new within the method local scope.

Can't your SQL server accept strings for dates? The ones I've used can, so I just do something like:

String sqlDate = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd").format(new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy").parse(startDate));

... and pass sqlDate to the parametrized query. Like konrad mentioned, lowercase 'mm' is for minutes, and uppercase 'MM' is for month, so I think that's where your problem was.