MySQL Query GROUP BY day / month / year

Question

Is it possible to make a simple query to count how many records I have in a determined period of time like a year, month, or day, having a TIMESTAMP field, like

Answer 1

If your search is over several years, and you still want to group monthly, I suggest:

version #1:

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE YEAR(record_date), MONTH(record_date), COUNT(*)
FROM stats
GROUP BY DATE_FORMAT(record_date, '%Y%m')

version #2 (more efficient):

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE YEAR(record_date), MONTH(record_date), COUNT(*)
FROM stats
GROUP BY YEAR(record_date)*100 + MONTH(record_date)

I compared these versions on a big table with 1,357,918 rows (innodb), and the 2nd version appears to have better results.

version1 (average of 10 executes): 1.404 seconds
version2 (average of 10 executes): 0.780 seconds

(SQL_NO_CACHE key added to prevent MySQL from CACHING to queries.)