[snip] Really what you are trying to do is search on month + day, not a date. For special "dates" (birthday, anniversary, etc), I always store the year separately. Especially since some people don't really want you to know how old they are.
Without breaking the "date" up into it's separate parts, you can't use an index, so you will always do a full table scan. Your searches will get slower as you add more records. I don't know how many records you are searching on in your example, but if you have a lot, the difference is pretty minimal and may be due to slightly different loads on the computer. Although the DATE_FORMAT one has the extra overhead of formating every single record to do the comparison. [/snip] So if I index a date field (given yyyy-mm-dd) and then SELECT `userNames` FROM `userTable` WHERE SUBSTRING(`userBirthDate`, 6, 5) = SUBSTRING(NOW(), 6, 5) it is still very fast. I have a table with several thousand records in it and I get back ... 30 rows in set (0.00 sec) -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
