Timestamp data type / indexing and seacrhing

[Jeffrey Jennings]

for years I have used NOW() and an interger of length 10 for my timestamp fields, but I see now there is a timestamp datatype that inserts data in date and time format that appears to be accurate to the second.

my question is this. I'll soon be creating a few tables that will each have on an ongoing basis about 500k to 600k rows and one of the indexed fields will be timestamp.

I only need accuracy to the second (not any fraction of a second) because I'll be doing lots of search on the tables for all records that have been added in the last 24 hours (counts, averaging of fields in those records, etc) and my question is this.

will it be faster to perform a query on the date field for all rows added in the prior 24 hours if I use the timestamp data tpe or if I have unix time in a 10 byte integer field.

speed of query results in highly important to be so now that I'm in the planning phase for the table fields I want to choose the option that works best from a query speed standpoint.

thanks in advance.