On 17/12/2010, at 9:02 AM, Jerry Schwartz wrote: > I have to move the back-end of an Access application to MySQL, and I’ve run > into one issue that I haven’t been able to solve yet. > > The Access database stores dates as text in a “yyyy/mm/dd” format. The > problem is that the default value is a formula that generates the current > date, formatted as text. In Access, it looks like > > '=Format$(Now(),\"yyyy/mm/dd\")' > > This construct is used throughout the table definitions. > > Is there any alternative to setting the default to something else (NULL, for > example) and moving the “default” into the application code? That would be a > significant PITA.
If a 32-bit date range is enough, then you can use the timestamp data type. That supports having the current time as the default value. See also http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/timestamp.html Regards, Jesper
