From: Jesper Wisborg Krogh (mysqlwisborg.dk)
Date: Fri Dec 17 2010 - 05:06:52 CST

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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

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