[BNM] MySQL date time formats

[Oliver Marshall]

Grrrrr. I have to replicate this web report in MS Access as well.

Don't suppose you know if Access support such bonkers time/date formats
?


-----Original Message-----
From: dom at happygiraffe.net [mailto:dom at happygiraffe.net] 
Sent: 04 July 2006 16:40
To: Brighton New Media
Subject: Re: [BNM] MySQL date time formats

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

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