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MySQL Date Formats

Much like PHP, MySQL 5 uses a form of timestamp, but in its native form, it is not compatible with the PHP timestamp. MySQL has three time/date field types: DATE (a date), TIME (a time), and DATETIME (a date and a time). MySQL also has a special date field type called TIMESTAMP, which works like DATETIME but automatically updates to the current timestamp with every insert and update and has a different internal storage mechanism.

There are numerical ways of representing data in your queries for these types, but it's much easier to use a string in your SQL. For example, you can use 2008-09-26 as a date, 13:23:56 as a time, and 2008-09-26 13:23:56 as a date and time. To convert a PHP timestamp in $timestamp into a form suitable ...