Category Archives: MySQL

While MySQL has quite an assortment of date and time formats which it supports, I usually find it most convenient to store timestamps as an INT and just put the UNIX seconds since the epoch value in there. … A drawback is that sometimes when I’m working with the database by hand it’s annoying to see the timestamps as big numbers – sometimes it would be very helpful to see them as dates and times. … The “FROM_UNIXTIME()” function will interpret a numeric column’s value as a UNIX seconds-from-the-epoch value and show it as a date and timestamp. Using it I can easily do things like: SELECT URL, FROM_UNIXTIME(Timestamp) FROM AccessLog; and see it as: +—————————+————————–+ | URL | FROM_UNIXTIME(timestamp) | +—————————+————————–+ | explore/users/94 | 2008-10-05 22:49:39 | +—————————+————————–+ rather than +—————————+————+ | URL | timestamp | +—————————+————+ | explore/users/94 | 1223261379 | +—————————+————+ Continue reading →