“All of the larger systems that I’ve helped develop necessitated
storing some combination of date and time fields. Almost
universally, these fields presented difficulties of some kind or
another. One particularly memorable challenge was converting
between internal storage and display formats that featured the
month name rather than a numeric one. We were able to overcome it
using a combination of database and programming solutions, but it
would have been much easier had we been using MySQL. Its thorough
and flexible date handling allows you to switch between internal
and external date/time formats with relative ease. Now I’d like to
show you what we could have done in MySQL…“Some Date/Time Basics
“MySQL supports a variety of date/time data type combinations.
All you have to do, when creating a date/time column, is choose one
of the following types that most closely matches the date/time
portion and accuracy that you require:”