You should start by using MySQL date as the standard for date: YYYY-MM-DD After that it is simple:
SELECT * FROM documents WHERE doc_date<2006-05-02 ORDER BY doc_date DESC LIMIT 1; Othervise you could use MySQL function to take sub strings and create a field in the query that extract it as 06-05-02 and order by that. /Peter -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2006 3:04 PM To: mysql@lists.mysql.com Subject: Getting the previous months documents I have a database that stores documents relating to meetings. They have all the usual stuff agenda, minutes etc. There are 3 paper types for each date agenda (1 only), minutes (1 only), and a bunch of general documents titled 'papers'. I need to display all the documents for a specific date which is easy but I also need to retrieve the minutes for the PREVIOUS meeting which is proving more difficult. The documents are stored by date in the format dd/mm/yy. If someone wants the documents from 02/05/06 how do I find the minutes for the previous date when I do not know when it is? Can I do this with mysql? Or will it be better with mktime and some php? -- -- Table structure for table `board_papers` -- CREATE TABLE `board_papers` ( `id` int(4) NOT NULL auto_increment, `doc_date` varchar(10) NOT NULL default '0000-00-00', `article_type` enum('agenda','minutes','paper') NOT NULL default 'agenda', `fileName` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `fileSize` int(4) NOT NULL default '0', `fileType` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `content` blob NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=7 ; -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
