he user comment system in the MySQL manual is not the place to request features.

You can do so using our bug-tracking system at http://bugs.mysql.com/. Thanks. (Actually, your comment is not a feature request, but it relates to another comment that is. The example youre giving is nice, but this is a reference manual, so we have to restrict it to _a few_ useful examples.) My original comment was: You bring up some important issues, but dealing with ages really isnt that hard. For example you could do something like this:
mysql> SELECT DATE_FORMAT(FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(NOW())-TO_DAYS(dob)), '%Y') +0 AS age FROM people;

Where dob is obviously their date of birth. Itll also work with pre and post-epoch dates. Please excuse the funky formatting as the comment stem seems to insist on inserting line breaks into the code block. I ran into this problem while working on some genealogical things over at Mullenweg.com, a family site. I hope this helps! Looking back, its funny that the comment is still around, I wrote it over two years ago. The date and time functions is the MySQL page I use most, so in some sense it was always nice to have my mark on there. For google and posterity Ive preserved the comment here. Im glad theyre cleaning up the comments, as they are really bad in places and have atrocious formatting, especially when compared to say, the PHP manual. However there is a later comment (which is still up) that offers perhaps a better method. From Kirill Novitchenko: The method posted by Mathew Mullenweg is good, but leap years goof it up on birthdays. (Try it. Use the current date and subtract exactly 5 years ago.) Hopefully this will be the last find age function. There is a simple premise to it: 1. Subtract the current year from the birth year to get the age. 2. If the current month and date is less than the birth month and date, subtract 1 from step 1. Therefore, this should work with everyone who wasnt born in the future.
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '%Y') - DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%Y') (DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '00-%m-%d') < DATE_FORMAT(dob, '00-%m-%d')) AS age

where dob is date of birth.

3.3.4.5. Date Calculations MySQL provides several functions that you can use to perform calculations on dates, for example, to calculate ages or extract parts of dates. To determine how many years old each of your pets is, compute the difference in the year part of the current date and the birth date, then subtract one if the current date occurs earlier in the calendar year than the birth date. The following query shows, for each pet, the birth date, the current date, and the age in years.
mysql> SELECT name, birth, CURDATE(), -> (YEAR(CURDATE())-YEAR(birth)) -> - (RIGHT(CURDATE(),5)<RIGHT(birth,5)) -> AS age -> FROM pet; +----------+------------+------------+------+ | name | birth | CURDATE() | age | +----------+------------+------------+------+ | Fluffy | 1993-02-04 | 2003-08-19 | 10 | | Claws | 1994-03-17 | 2003-08-19 | 9 | | Buffy | 1989-05-13 | 2003-08-19 | 14 | | Fang | 1990-08-27 | 2003-08-19 | 12 | | Bowser | 1989-08-31 | 2003-08-19 | 13 | | Chirpy | 1998-09-11 | 2003-08-19 | 4 | | Whistler | 1997-12-09 | 2003-08-19 | 5 | | Slim | 1996-04-29 | 2003-08-19 | 7 | | Puffball | 1999-03-30 | 2003-08-19 | 4 | +----------+------------+------------+------+

Here, YEAR() pulls out the year part of a date and RIGHT() pulls off the rightmost five characters that represent the MM-DD (calendar year) part of the date. The part of the expression that compares the MM-DD values evaluates to 1 or 0, which adjusts the year difference down a year if CURDATE() occurs earlier in the year than birth. The full expression is somewhat ungainly, so an alias (age) is used to make the output column label more meaningful. The query works, but the result could be scanned more easily if the rows were presented in some order. This can be done by adding an ORDER BY name clause to sort the output by name:
mysql> SELECT name, birth, CURDATE(), -> (YEAR(CURDATE())-YEAR(birth)) -> - (RIGHT(CURDATE(),5)<RIGHT(birth,5)) -> AS age -> FROM pet ORDER BY name; +----------+------------+------------+------+ | name | birth | CURDATE() | age | +----------+------------+------------+------+ | Bowser | 1989-08-31 | 2003-08-19 | 13 |

| Buffy | 1989-05-13 | 2003-08-19 | 14 | | Chirpy | 1998-09-11 | 2003-08-19 | 4 | | Claws | 1994-03-17 | 2003-08-19 | 9 | | Fang | 1990-08-27 | 2003-08-19 | 12 | | Fluffy | 1993-02-04 | 2003-08-19 | 10 | | Puffball | 1999-03-30 | 2003-08-19 | 4 | | Slim | 1996-04-29 | 2003-08-19 | 7 | | Whistler | 1997-12-09 | 2003-08-19 | 5 | +----------+------------+------------+------+

To sort the output by age rather than name, just use a different ORDER BY clause:
mysql> SELECT name, birth, CURDATE(), -> (YEAR(CURDATE())-YEAR(birth)) -> - (RIGHT(CURDATE(),5)<RIGHT(birth,5)) -> AS age -> FROM pet ORDER BY age; +----------+------------+------------+------+ | name | birth | CURDATE() | age | +----------+------------+------------+------+ | Chirpy | 1998-09-11 | 2003-08-19 | 4 | | Puffball | 1999-03-30 | 2003-08-19 | 4 | | Whistler | 1997-12-09 | 2003-08-19 | 5 | | Slim | 1996-04-29 | 2003-08-19 | 7 | | Claws | 1994-03-17 | 2003-08-19 | 9 | | Fluffy | 1993-02-04 | 2003-08-19 | 10 | | Fang | 1990-08-27 | 2003-08-19 | 12 | | Bowser | 1989-08-31 | 2003-08-19 | 13 | | Buffy | 1989-05-13 | 2003-08-19 | 14 | +----------+------------+------------+------+

A similar query can be used to determine age at death for animals that have died. You determine which animals these are by checking whether the death value is NULL. Then, for those with non-NULL values, compute the difference between the death and birth values:
mysql> SELECT name, birth, death, -> (YEAR(death)-YEAR(birth)) - (RIGHT(death,5)<RIGHT(birth,5)) -> AS age -> FROM pet WHERE death IS NOT NULL ORDER BY age; +--------+------------+------------+------+ | name | birth | death | age | +--------+------------+------------+------+ | Bowser | 1989-08-31 | 1995-07-29 | 5 | +--------+------------+------------+------+

The query uses death IS NOT NULL rather than death <> NULL because NULL is a special value that cannot be compared using the usual comparison operators. This is discussed later. See Section 3.3.4.6, Working with NULL Values. What if you want to know which animals have birthdays next month? For this type of calculation, year and day are irrelevant; you simply want to extract the month part of the birth column. MySQL provides several functions for extracting parts of dates, such as

YEAR(), MONTH(),

and DAYOFMONTH(). MONTH() is the appropriate function here. To see how it works, run a simple query that displays the value of both birth and MONTH(birth):
mysql> SELECT name, birth, MONTH(birth) FROM pet; +----------+------------+--------------+ | name | birth | MONTH(birth) | +----------+------------+--------------+ | Fluffy | 1993-02-04 | 2 | | Claws | 1994-03-17 | 3 | | Buffy | 1989-05-13 | 5 | | Fang | 1990-08-27 | 8 | | Bowser | 1989-08-31 | 8 | | Chirpy | 1998-09-11 | 9 | | Whistler | 1997-12-09 | 12 | | Slim | 1996-04-29 | 4 | | Puffball | 1999-03-30 | 3 | +----------+------------+--------------+

Finding animals with birthdays in the upcoming month is also simple. Suppose that the current month is April. Then the month value is 4 and you can look for animals born in May (month 5) like this:
mysql> SELECT name, birth FROM pet WHERE MONTH(birth) = 5; +-------+------------+ | name | birth | +-------+------------+ | Buffy | 1989-05-13 | +-------+------------+

There is a small complication if the current month is December. You cannot merely add one to the month number (12) and look for animals born in month 13, because there is no such month. Instead, you look for animals born in January (month 1). You can write the query so that it works no matter what the current month is, so that you do not have to use the number for a particular month. DATE_ADD() enables you to add a time interval to a given date. If you add a month to the value of CURDATE(), then extract the month part with MONTH(), the result produces the month in which to look for birthdays:
mysql> SELECT name, birth FROM pet -> WHERE MONTH(birth) = MONTH(DATE_ADD(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 1 MONTH));

A different way to accomplish the same task is to add 1 to get the next month after the current one after using the modulo function (MOD) to wrap the month value to 0 if it is currently 12:
mysql> SELECT name, birth FROM pet -> WHERE MONTH(birth) = MOD(MONTH(CURDATE()), 12) + 1;

returns a number between 1 and 12. And MOD(something,12) returns a number between 0 and 11. So the addition has to be after the MOD(), otherwise we would go from November (11) to January (1).
MONTH()

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User Comments
Posted by Dan Fitzpatrick on May 28 2002 10:00am In a business context, a more interesting query for this sample db might be the one alluded to earlier in the tutorial - select rows whose birthdays are coming up soon to send out a reminder... Here is the way I did that: SET @bdayThreshhold=150; SELECT name, birth, CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth,5) < RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5))
+ YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), RIGHT(birth,6)) AS bday,

[Delete] [Edit]

TO_DAYS(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth,5) < RIGHT (CURRENT_DATE,5))

+ YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), RIGHT(birth,6))) - TO_DAYS

(CURRENT_DATE) AS toBday FROM pet WHERE (TO_DAYS(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth,5) < RIGHT (CURRENT_DATE,5))

+ YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), RIGHT(birth,6))) - TO_DAYS

(CURRENT_DATE) < @bdayThreshhold) ORDER BY bday, RIGHT(birth,5); Note that I set the threshhold kind of high in order to make sure that I matched something in the limited tutorial dataset. Normally you would probably want 15-30 days. Posted by Bryan Perry on November 12 2002 12:12pm Here is another useful way of calculating age that I have used in some of my own work: SELECT DATE

[Delete] [Edit]

FORMAT(FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(NOW())-TO_DAYS (dob)), '%Y')+0 AS age FROM people; Posted by Bryan on March 12 2003 12:28pm RE: How can I find next Friday's date? SELECT DATE_ADD(CURRENT_DATE,INTERVAL (6DAYOFWEEK(CURRENT_DATE)) DAY); How can I find this month, second Wednesday's date? SET @First = CONCAT(EXTRACT(YEAR_MONTH FROM (DATE_ADD(CURRENT_DATE,INTERVAL 1 MONTH))),"01"); SELECT DATE_ADD(@First,INTERVAL (11 + (7 * (DAYOFWEEK(@First) > 4)) DAYOFWEEK(@First)) DAY); Hope this helps, no matter how tardy it is. -Bryan Posted by Manuel Guerrero on April 21 2003 5:57am [Delete] [Edit] [Delete] [Edit]

If you need to know who's birthday is within the next X days, you can use something like This: select * from YourTable where (unix_timestamp(date_format(fecnac,"2003-%m-%d 00:00:00"))) between (unix_timestamp(date_format(curdate(),"2003-%m-%d 00:00:00"))) and (unix_timestamp(date_format((curdate()+interval 7 day),"2003-%m-%d 00:00:00"))) fecnac is the date of birth. Posted by Qing on August 7 2003 9:09am Bryan, I think your way to calculate next Friday is not correct: SELECT DATE_ADD(CURRENT_DATE,INTERVAL (6DAYOFWEEK(CURRENT_DATE)) DAY); This will return the date of this Friday if the current date is Saturday. It could be change to: SELECT DATE_ADD(CURRENT_DATE,INTERVAL mod(6DAYOFWEEK(current_date)+7,7) DAY); Thank you for your example [Delete] [Edit]

Posted by Gunnar Kristiansen on March 9 2004 2:44pm Hi How can this example be changed:

[Delete] [Edit]

mysql> SELECT name, birth FROM pet -> WHERE MONTH(birth) = MONTH(DATE_ADD(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 0 MONTH)); ...so that the output will be "this week", rather than "this month"? Regards Gunnar Kristiansen Posted by Juan Antonio on June 1 2005 8:30pm [Delete] [Edit]

i think this function i made have only 4 functions: left((CURDATE()-birth),(CHAR_LENGTH(CURDATE()-birth)-4)) as age is better than this becouse it have 6(the example avobe documentation): (YEAR(CURDATE())-YEAR(birth))-(RIGHT(CURDATE(),5)<RIGHT(birth,5)) as age Posted by Frances D on June 7 2006 4:31pm [Delete] [Edit]

Re the documentation's note that... "Note that MONTH returns a number between 1 and 12" Fyi, the Month() function additionally will return a zero value (if the month spots in your date are zero). Posted by jeremy levine on August 22 2006 7:30pm Get the first day and/or last day of the current year. This is the first day of the year ( simple ) SELECT MAKEDATE( EXTRACT(YEAR FROM CURDATE()),1); This is the last day ( not you can not just replace the 1 with a 365 , some years you need a 366) SELECT STR_TO_DATE(CONCAT(12,31,EXTRACT(YEAR FROM CURDATE())), '%m%d%Y') ; Posted by Vijay Kumar on March 13 2007 9:25am [Delete] [Edit] [Delete] [Edit]

Here is the SP that i wrote , it may help somebody DELIMITER $$ DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `yourdatabase`.`getage` $$ CREATE DEFINER=`yourname`@`localhost` FUNCTION `getage`(pdate DATE) RETURNS int(11) BEGIN DECLARE years INT; DECLARE months INT; DECLARE days INT; DECLARE age INT; SELECT YEAR(pdate) INTO years; SELECT MONTH(pdate) INTO months; SELECT DAY(pdate) INTO days; IF ( MONTH(CURRENT_DATE()) > months ) THEN SELECT ( YEAR(CURRENT_DATE()) - YEAR(pdate) ) INTO age; ELSEIF ( MONTH(CURRENT_DATE()) < months ) THEN SELECT ( ( YEAR(CURRENT_DATE()) - YEAR(pdate) ) -1 ) INTO age; ELSE IF ( DAY(CURRENT_DATE()) >= DAY(pdate) ) THEN SELECT ( YEAR(CURRENT_DATE()) - YEAR(pdate) ) INTO age; ELSE SELECT ( ( YEAR(CURRENT_DATE()) - YEAR(pdate) ) -1 ) INTO age; END IF; END IF; RETURN age; END $$ DELIMITER ; Posted by Michael Jay on April 6 2007 3:41pm [Delete] [Edit]

For anyone trying to determine a birthday within the next x number of days this may help. Ignoring the year. The code below seems to work well. I'm also waiting for the bug preventing storage of 0000 year values to be resolved, so you can store dates when the year value is unknown. SELECT birthday,name,lastname from contact where(DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) <= dayofyear(birthday) AND DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) +15 >= dayofyear(birthday) OR DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) <= dayofyear(birthday)+365 AND DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) +15 >= dayofyear(birthday)+365);

Posted by Tim Mousel on August 17 2007 8:36pm Here is what I used to find birthdays for the current day:

[Delete] [Edit]

SELECT birth, email, username FROM members WHERE MONTH(birth) = MONTH(curdate()) AND DAYOFMONTH(birth) = DAYOFMONTH(curdate()); Posted by Kedar Acharekar on January 24 2008 11:21am Just try this.. SELECT DATE_FORMAT(DATE(concat('2000-',FIELD('Feb', 'Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May'),'-01')), '%m'); Posted by [name withheld] on July 18 2008 11:22am [Delete] [Edit] [Delete] [Edit]

Calculating age: "CAST((TO_DAYS(NOW())- TO_DAYS(birthdate)) / 365.25 as SIGNED)" has rounding problems, but "FLOOR((TO_DAYS(NOW())- TO_DAYS(birthdate)) / 365.25)" works as expected. Posted by Niels van Amstel on August 20 2008 1:14pm [Delete] [Edit]

I found that when trying to look for a pet's birthday a half year from now, it won't return anything from month 7 to 12 using this: SELECT name,birth FROM pet WHERE MONTH(birth)=MONTH(CURDATE())+6; However, when I used this: SELECT name,birth FROM pet WHERE MONTH(birth)=MONTH(CURDATE())+6 or MONTH(birth)=MONTH(CURDATE())-6; It does work (probably because it's looking past the month 12). The same goes with looking for a pet's birthday one month from now: SELECT name,birth FROM pet WHERE MONTH(birth)=MONTH(CURDATE())+1 or MONTH(birth)=MONTH(CURDATE())-11; Did any of you out there come with other solutions, as this did seems a bit tedious to me. Cheers. Posted by huang legend on October 31 2008 3:48am [Delete] [Edit]

i think a command like SELECT name,birth FROM pet WHERE MONTH(birth)=MONTH(CURDATE())+1 or

MONTH(birth)=MONTH(CURDATE())-11; just one OR sub clause works.Say,MONTH(CURDATE()=10 then just MONTH(CURDATE())+1 works, MONTH(CURDATE())-11 not.it seems just the expression value within 1 to 12 for MONTH works. Posted by Osbert Ngok on March 10 2009 12:19pm [Delete] [Edit]

I think the most trivial solution for the "birthdays in next X days" should be things like: SELECT `name`,`birthday`,IF (STR_TO_DATE(CONCAT(YEAR(CURDATE()),'/',MONTH(`birthday`),'/',DAY(`birt hday`)),'%Y/%c/%e') >= CURDATE(), STR_TO_DATE(CONCAT(YEAR(CURDATE()),'/',MONTH(`birthday`),'/',DAY(`birth day`)),'%Y/%c/%e') , STR_TO_DATE(CONCAT(YEAR(CURDATE()) +1,'/',MONTH(`birthday`),'/',DAY(`birthday`)),'%Y/%c/%e')) as `upcoming` FROM `contact` HAVING `upcoming` BETWEEN CURDATE() AND ADDDATE(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 30 DAY) ORDER BY `upcoming`; Posted by Alexander Gavazov on October 22 2009 10:01pm upcoming birthdays on mysql 5.0 SELECT FLOOR((UNIX_TIMESTAMP(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth, 5) < RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE, 5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), RIGHT(birth, 6))) UNIX_TIMESTAMP(CURRENT_DATE)) / 86400) AS upcoming_days FROM pet Posted by Erek Melbane on October 25 2009 11:46am [Delete] [Edit] [Delete] [Edit]

Here's another way to calculate age, using a nested SELECT statement. It's not 100% precise because not every four years is a leap year. Still working on how to SELECT pets with NULL value for death (i.e. living pets only). SELECT name, birth, datediff(curdate(), birth)/365.25 AS Age FROM pet WHERE birth = (SELECT min(birth) FROM pet); Posted by Allan Cano on October 6 2010 3:04pm [Delete] [Edit]

There are times when you want an age that includes months and days. In my case it's was for tracking rounding notes on a paediatric floor. Here's the simple function I came up with for calculating age. Tried this popular trick originally and found it failed to give a correct answer.

SELECT FROM_DAYS(DATEDIFF(current_date(),dob)) INTO age; -- Function -DELIMITER $$ DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS Age $$ CREATE FUNCTION Age( dob DATE ) RETURNS CHAR(20) BEGIN DECLARE years INT default 0; DECLARE months INT default 0; DECLARE days INT default 0; DECLARE age DATE; -- Check that the dob we're given is useful IF dob is null or dob = 0 or dob = '0000-00-00' THEN RETURN dob; END IF; SELECT date_add('0001-01-01', interval datediff(current_date(),dob) day ) INTO age; SELECT YEAR(age) -1 INTO years; SELECT MONTH(age)-1 INTO months; SELECT DAY(age) -1 INTO days; IF years THEN RETURN concat(years,'y ',months,'m'); ELSEIF months THEN RETURN concat(months,'m ',days,'d'); ELSE RETURN concat(days,' days'); END IF; END $$ DELIMITER ; Posted by Mark Stafford on January 6 2011 10:36pm [Delete] [Edit]

-- working with the other examples on this page I decided to return age as a date which facilitates further parsing of the results

DELIMITER // DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS get_age // CREATE FUNCTION get_age( p_after date, p_before date ) RETURNS date BEGIN DECLARE l_offset DATE default date_format('0001-01-01', '%Y-%m-%d'); DECLARE l_date_age DATE default date_sub( date_add( l_offset, INTERVAL datediff( p_after , p_before ) DAY ) - l_offset , interval 2000 year ); RETURN l_date_age; END // DELIMITER ; Posted by Poldi Rijke on March 8 2011 2:40pm MySQl 5.0 or higher: TIMESTAMPDIFF SELECT TIMESTAMPDIFF(YEAR, birthday, CURDATE() ) AS 'age in years' FROM person; From MySQL Cookbook p248 Posted by Rahul Sonar on May 16 2011 11:56am [Delete] [Edit] [Delete] [Edit]

SELECT CURDATE(), (YEAR(CURDATE())- YEAR(dob)) -( RIGHT(CURDATE(),5)< RIGHT(dob,5)) AS age, case when ((MONTH(CURDATE())- MONTH(dob)) - (RIGHT(CURDATE(),2)<RIGHT(dob,2)))>0 then ((MONTH(CURDATE())MONTH(dob)) - (RIGHT(CURDATE(),2)<RIGHT(dob,2))) else ((MONTH(CURDATE())MONTH(dob)) - (RIGHT(CURDATE(),2)<RIGHT(dob,2))) + 12 end AS Months, (DAY(CURDATE() - DAY(dob))) AS Days;