Date/Time Creation

In this this series on Dates and Times, we've explored MySQL's five temporal data types, as well as some of its many date/time-oriented functions. In this installment, we'll be covering a few ways to create dates and times in MySQL.

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Important Functions

In the first two installments of this series on Dates and Times, we covered MySQL's five temporal data types. Now it's time to turn our attention to some of MySQL's many date/time-oriented functions.

Getting the Current Date and Time

Back in May of 2021, we covered some of SQL Server's notable Date & Time functions, starting with how to obtain the current date and time. It offers the GETDATE() function for that purpose. MySQL's equivalent function is simply called NOW(). In Navicat for MySQL 16, we can invoke this function without connecting to a database, since we aren't selecting any table columns:

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TIMESTAMP and YEAR Types

Welcome back to this series on working with dates and times in MySQL. In the first two installments, we're looking at MySQL's temporal data types. Part 1 covered the DATE, TIME, and DATETIME data types, while this installment will cover the remaining TIMESTAMP and YEAR types.

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DATE, TIME, and DATETIME Types

The vast majority of databases store a great deal of "temporal" data. Temporal data is simply data that represents a state in time. An organization may collect temporal data for a variety of reasons, such as to analyze weather patterns and other environmental variables, monitor traffic conditions, study demographic trends, etc. Businesses also routinely need to store temporal data about when orders were placed, stock refilled, staff hired, and a whole host of other information about their day-to-day business.

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