Chapter 9. Date and Time Values
When beginning to program database-oriented applications, it is not uncommon to focus on processing data and to forget about matters of time and timing. If a program is simply storing addresses or otherwise dealing with data that is not naturally time-sensitive, it is easy to overlook matters of date and time. However, storing date and time for data and activity on the server allows for several desiderata, some of which are:
Rolling back documents to an earlier draft version without affecting the current draft
Figuring out why a process or subprocess jammed up or failed
Forensic analysis of a compromised server
In this chapter, we will see:
What data types MySQL supports for date and time
When to use which data type and in what format and range
What functions MySQL supports for managing temporal values
The most frequently used functions for managing date and time
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the project for this chapter will build on the web application we...
