Question

Why is the timestamp generated by the PHP time() function so different from SQL datetime?

If I do a date('Y-m-d', time()); in PHP, it gives me the time now, as it should. If I just take the time() portion and do:

$now = time();
//then execute this statement 'SELECT * FROM `reservation` WHERE created_at < $now'

I get nothing. But hey, so if the value of $now was 1273959833 and I queried

  'SELECT * FROM `reservation` WHERE created_at < 127395983300000000'

then I see the records that I have created. I think one is tracked in microseconds vs the other is in seconds, but I can’t find any documentation on this! What would be the right conversion between these two?

Answer 1

The time() function doesn’t return microseconds, so it should work if you’re using the correct datatype. But you have 2 different datatypes right now, INT and a date field (could be DATE/DATETIME/TIMESTAMP). If you want to compare a date in the database to a timestamp as integer, you could use something like:

SELECT * FROM Tbl WHERE UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date) < $timestamp;