Question

I’m try to extract info from a MySQL DB into a MS SQL DB. The DB is a mess and the developer is no longer available.

All dates are in char fields, and I use

SELECT concat( mid(DueDate, 7, 4), mid(DueDate, 4, 2), mid(DueDate, 1, 2)) as DueDate FROM TableName 

to get the date field in a format so MS sql server can import them.

Now, I want to export only the record with the date greater than today, so the questions are:

• What is the equivalent of GetDate() in MySQL?
• Is there a better way to cast the date to make the comparison?

Answer 1

In MySQL you can convert a string to a date using the STR_TO_DATE function.

An example usage is:

mysql> SELECT STR_TO_DATE('04/31/2004', '%m/%d/%Y');         -> '2004-04-31' 

To get the current date in MySQL simply use the NOW() function. You can then check if a parsed date is later than today using something like

WHERE STR_TO_DATE('04/31/2009', '%m/%d/%Y') > NOW()