While I agree with this to an extent, MySQL also has a ton of functions for modifying and comparing dates. The TIMESTAMP type tends to be useless for what the OP is looking for -- as it gets updated each time the record is updated. However, DATETIME does not, and it becomes fairly trivial to write SQL that can do date/time comparisons on such fields. The reason I would prefer to use the SQL over using perl in this instance is that it's portable; if I choose to use another language, I can use the same SQL for doing the comparison.

I leave it up to the OP to look up the date and time functions; they're very well documented on the MySQL site. (Which is where s/he should have started looking, really... :-)

In reply to Re^2: 5 minutes of time by weierophinney
in thread 5 minutes of time by Anonymous Monk

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