If you need to search for specific dates or date ranges, the database engine is better equipped than bare Perl.

SELECT 
    your_fields 
FROM 
    your_table 
WHERE 
    Timestamp_field BETWEEN "2003-02-01 10:30" 
        AND "2003-02-05 12:00"
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Moreover, MySQL has a large collection of date-oriented functions, which you should consider before burdening your client with tasks that should belong in the server.

However, if you really must, you can extract from a timestamp value the same fields that you get from localtime.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year) =
  localtime(1044436437); # Wed Feb  5 10:13:57 2003
$year += 1900;
$mon++;

my $timestamp = "20030205101357";
my ($tyear, $tmon, $tmday, $thour,$tmin, $tsec) =
  $timestamp =~ /(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})/;

printf "       Time Timestamp\n";
printf "year   %4d  %4d\n", $year, $tyear;
printf "month  %4d  %4d\n", $mon,  $tmon;
printf "day    %4d  %4d\n", $mday, $tmday;
printf "hour   %4d  %4d\n", $hour, $thour;
printf "min    %4d  %4d\n", $min,  $tmin;
printf "sec    %4d  %4d\n", $sec,  $tsec;
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Having done that, you can easily compare fields coming from localtime with the ones coming from timestamps.

For complicated operations, you may want to trust some modules, such as Date::Calc or Date::Manip

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