Question

I have a table in a database that represents dates textually (i.e. ‘2008-11-09’) and I would like to replace them with the UNIX timestamp. However, I don’t think that MySQL is capable of doing the conversion on its own, so I’d like to write a little script to do the conversion. The way I can think to do it involves getting all the records in the table, iterating through them, and updating the database records. However, with no primary key, I can’t easily get the exact record I need to update.

Is there a way to get MySQL to assign temporary IDs to records during a SELECT so that I refer back to them when doing UPDATEs?

Answer 1

Does this not do it?

UPDATE   MyTable SET   MyTimeStamp = UNIX_TIMESTAMP(MyDateTime);