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

I prefer to optimize the one year group selection like so:

SELECT COUNT(*)
  FROM stats
 WHERE record_date >= :year 
   AND record_date <  :year + INTERVAL 1 YEAR;

This way you can just bind the year in once, e.g. '2009', with a named parameter and don't need to worry about adding '-01-01' or passing in '2010' separately.

Also, as presumably we are just counting rows and id is never NULL, I prefer COUNT(*) to COUNT(id).