Question

I’m trying to request any records from a table that appear on or after today’s date, using a single query.
All the dates for each record are stored in separate columns e.g.. – one for month, one for year, and one for day.

obviously i’ve been getting all records that occur after the year in today’s date

$sql = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE year>=".$year_today." 
       ORDER BY year, month, day";

Then i’ve been trying to filter that down a bit, by using:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM table 
        WHERE year>=".$year_today." && month>=".$month_today." 
              && day>=".$day_today." 
        ORDER BY year, month, day";

And in order to test it, i created a record in the database with yesterdays date, yet, this record still appears in the list of returned records. What am i doing wrong? 🙁

Answer 1

I don’t know if you can use "&&" instead of "AND" in your context – maybe try changing your SQL to use

" AND month>=".$month_today." AND day>=".$day_today."

EDIT :

as an extension to Nick’s answer, to make the sql behave correctly you could code :

$sql = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE (  
(year>".$year_today.")
OR (year=".$year_today." && month>".$month_today." )
OR (year=".$year_today." && month=".$month_today."&& day>=".$day_today.")
)
 ORDER BY year, month, day";

…but this starts to get a whole lot messier than converting to dates and using date comparison

EDIT2:

but then again, if these columns are indexed, the indexes might be used. It’s still a lot more effort to code SQL this way if performance using conversion to dates is totally acceptable.