Question

I have the following trigger which inserts records into Table B whenever Table A is updated. This works fine however TableA_date is in unix time format and I want to convert it when the trigger inserts the record in Table B.

DELIMITER $$
CREATE TRIGGER MyTrigger
AFTER INSERT
ON TableA
FOR EACH ROW 
BEGIN
    INSERT INTO TableB SET 
    TableB_id = NEW.TableA_id, 
    TableB_date = FROM_UNIXTIME(NEW.TableA_date, '%d/%m/%y %r'),
    TableB_comment = NEW.TableA_comment;
END $$
DELIMITER ;

In my results, instead of “01/01/70 03:00:05 AM” as the converted date I get “5” – I know the format string is correct as I am able to use it in a select statement. Thanks for your help

Answer 1

You are working too hard. Just leave out the format string entirely. Dates are stored as dates, not a strings.

In fact, don’t even use the conversion at all! Just directly assign the date column, and MySQL will do any conversion it needs.

I’m assuming that TableA_date is stored using the timestamp datatype, and that TableB_date is datetime. (Although you may want timestamp for that one too.)

If you are using other datatypes like int, or char, then fix it. That’s not the correct way to structure a database.

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Just to answer your actual question (instead of telling you the correct way to do it) the date format you want is yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss not what you have.