Default date

[Rob]

Hello all

I have a field (called active) of type DATE and I want to add a default
value. The default value must be the current date. Is this possible to do
this in the table create statement?

CREATE TABLE mytable
(
id INTEGER NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
active DATE DEFAULT ?????,
PRIMARY KEY (id),
)

Thanks in advance
Roger

[Jonathan]

Rob wrote:

Hello all

I have a field (called active) of type DATE and I want to add a default
value. The default value must be the current date. Is this possible to do
this in the table create statement?

CREATE TABLE mytable
(
id INTEGER NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
active DATE DEFAULT ?????,
PRIMARY KEY (id),
)

Thanks in advance
Roger

Why not vonvert the column to a timestamp? This way it will always hold
the current date (and time) if you modify the record.

Jonathan

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[Bill Karwin]

Rob wrote:

I have a field (called active) of type DATE and I want to add a default
value. The default value must be the current date. Is this possible to do
this in the table create statement?

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/create-table.html:

"The DEFAULT clause specifies a default value for a column. With one
exception, the default value must be a constant; it cannot be a function
or an expression. This means, for example, that you cannot set the
default for a date column to be the value of a function such as NOW() or
CURRENT_DATE. The exception is that you can specify CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as
the default for a TIMESTAMP column as of MySQL 4.1.2. See Section
11.3.1.2, TIMESTAMP Properties as of MySQL 4.1."

So this means that you can't do what you describe on a field with a DATE
datatype. You must use TIMESTAMP as the datatype.

Regards,
Bill K.