You should look at inflating your timestamp values into objects using Class::DBI. You can use Time::Piece::mysql for this, or DateTime::Format::MySQL (there are others as well that will work like Class::Date which is described on the cdbi wiki).

use Time::Piece::mysql;
__PACKAGE__->has_a(date_col => 'Time::Piece');

# or

use DateTime::Format::MySQL;
__PACKAGE__->has_a(date_col => 'DateTime',
  inflate => sub { DateTime::Format::MySQL->parse_datetime(shift) },
  deflate => sub { DateTime::Format::MySQL->format_datetime(shift) });
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Then when you have your Class::DBI object, and you retrieve the date column, you will get a Time::Piece or DateTime object that you can pass to the TT Date Plugin in whatever format it accepts.

Or, since your dates are now objects already, just use them directly in TT to format your dates. This removes the need for the Date plugin.

[% date_col.ymd('-') %]
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