How to get current date & time in MySQL?

Question

Is there a value or command like DATETIME that I can use in a manual query to insert the current date and time?

INSERT INTO servers (
  server_name, online_         


        

Answer 1

The correct answer is SYSDATE().

INSERT INTO servers (
    server_name, online_status, exchange, disk_space,
    network_shares, date_time
)
VALUES (
    'm1', 'ONLINE', 'ONLINE', '100GB', 'ONLINE', SYSDATE()
);

We can change this behavior and make NOW() behave in the same way as SYSDATE() by setting sysdate_is_now command line argument to True.

Note that NOW() (which has CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() as an alias), differs from SYSDATE() in a subtle way:

SYSDATE() returns the time at which it executes. This differs from the behavior for NOW(), which returns a constant time that indicates the time at which the statement began to execute. (Within a stored function or trigger, NOW() returns the time at which the function or triggering statement began to execute.)

As indicated by Erandi, it is best to create your table with the DEFAULT clause so that the column gets populated automatically with the timestamp when you insert a new row:

date_time datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT SYSDATE()

---

If you want the current date in epoch format, then you can use UNIX_TIMESTAMP(). For example:

select now(3), sysdate(3), unix_timestamp();

would yield

+-------------------------+-------------------------+------------------+
| now(3)                  | sysdate(3)              | unix_timestamp() |
+-------------------------+-------------------------+------------------+
| 2018-11-27 01:40:08.160 | 2018-11-27 01:40:08.160 |       1543282808 |
+-------------------------+-------------------------+------------------+

Related:

• Difference between NOW(), SYSDATE() & CURRENT_DATE() in MySQL