Question

If birthdate’s are stored as type “Date” in MySQL, how would you determine if it’s a specific user’s birthday today in PHP?

Is it simply a matter of grabbing the birthdate column value, doing on a explode on the -, and then checking if the day and month match the current day and month in PHP? Or is there a simpler and less crude way of doing it?

Also, what query would you use to SELECT all users whose birthday it is today?

Answer 1

Since you’ll need to exclude the year, you can use the MONTH and DAY SQL functions like so:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE MONTH(birthday) = MONTH(NOW()) AND DAY(birthday) = DAY(NOW());

Don’t forget to add an index on this column or it will seriously degrade performance as data grows.

In PHP, you can just use the date function:

if (date('m-d', strtotime($row['date'])) == date('m-d'))
    //-- Today is my birthday! Hooray!