You probably have your reasons, so I shouldn't ask. But just in case, I was wondering if you had a really good reason for storing YEAR, MONTH and DAY as separate fields in the database, instead of being stored in a date format recognized by your database.

Most DB's can sort dates natively, and for those that can't, Perl has a proliferation of date modules that simplify the process. ...but all of these methods work best with a complete date.