skywalker:

I normally let the database do that for me, as they often have the ability to do that kind of formatting. A couple examples:

ORACLE:

select BoringColumn, to_char(DateTimeColumn, 'YYYYMMDD') as TheDate
from TABLE
[download]

MS-SQL, Sybase:

select BoringColumn, convert(varchar(8),DateTimeColumn,112) as TheDate
from TABLE
[download]

I don't use other database engines very often, so I'm not familiar with the syntax on any others...

...roboticus