When dealing with dates in databases (and generally, too), you will profit a lot from using the representation commonly known as ISO Date Format, described in more detail in ISO 8601:1988 Date/Time Representations (Note that this is only a description of the standard, not the standard itself (for which the copyright is held by the ISO)), which is commonly used in the two forms 'YYYYMMDD' and 'YYYY-MM-DD', where Y is a year digit, M is a month digit, and D is a day digit. Access will recognize and autoconvert the first form without problems, as will MS SQL Server and Sybase.

This form of representation has numerous advantages, not the least being that you can sort dates represented like that by a simple string comparison sort.

Much more nice info on dates is available in a very compact form at J. R. Stockton's Date Formats page.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com