Working with times and dates
As we discussed in Chapter 2, Databases and Tables, MariaDB supports the following temporal data types:
DATE
TIME
DATETIME
TIMESTAMP
Working with this kind of data requires specifically-designed functions and syntaxes. This section discusses how to perform the most common temporal operations.
Writing temporal values
With old MariaDB versions, DATE
, TIME
, and DATETIME
values can only be written as strings. This syntax has been designed to be as error-proof as possible, which makes it very easy to use. Some examples are as follows:
'1994-01-01'
'1994-01-01 12:30:00'
'12:30'
Starting from version 10.0, the standard SQL syntax can be used. This eliminates ambiguities in the rare cases when MariaDB does not know if a value should be regarded as a string or as a date. The standard syntax is:
DATE '1994-01-01'
TIMESTAMP '1994-01-01 12:30:00'
TIME '12:30'
Adding and subtracting time intervals
It is possible to add or subtract a time interval to specific temporal data. The syntax...