[BNM] MySQL date time formats

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 04:31:27PM +0100, Oliver Marshall wrote:
> I am creating a web report pulling data from a MySQL database we have
> here. 
> 
> The datetime field of this particular database (not created by me) is
> set as the type "BIGINT" and the date and times in it are 13 number long
> integers.
> 
> Is this a normal way of storing date/times in mysql? Any suggestions how
> I can decipher the correct date from this ?

It's not unusual, it's likely to be the number of seconds since Jan 1st
1970.  That's an old Unix convention[1].  If you have a chance, you're
probably better off using MySQL's native DATETIME type if you can
change the database.

As to interpreting those integers, have a look at localtime() and
strftime() in PHP.

  http://uk.php.net/localtime
  http://uk.php.net/strftime

-Dom

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_Epoch