Re: Casting Varchar to a date

[Phillip Ward]

Quote

Question: The value seem to be showing as "2013-06-12" (effectively, YYYY-MM-DD)
I thought as we declared it as: %d/%m/%Y

The most important thing you need to know about Date formats in [just about] any database is this:

   Dates have no format.

They are held internally as numbers, the exact structure and "format" of which varies from DBMS to DBMS and over which you have no control.

When you select Date values in the mysql client (and don't explicitly format them yourself) then the client will apply some "default" formatting for you (it has to render everything as text so it has to convert its internal, date representatation into something you and I can understand). If you pull data into other applications, e.g. MS Excel, then that application can do this formatting for you.

Regards, Phill W.