You might want to take a look at Time::Piece (alt.), which does just this sort of thing ...

use Time::Piece;

my %format = (
    Apache => "[%d/%b/%Y:%T -0800]",
    MySQL  => "%Y%m%d%H%M%S",
    Sybase => "%Y-%m-%d %T -0800",
);

my @dates = (
  [ "[27/Feb/2002:05:05:51 -0800]" => "Apache" ],
  [ "2002-02-23 01:27:25 -0800"    => "Sybase" ],
);

foreach my $date ( @dates )
{
    my($str,$type) = @$date;

    my $t = Time::Piece->strptime( $str, $format{$type} );
    print $t->strftime( $format{"MySQL"} ), $/;
}
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    --k.