SQLite date storage and conversion

Question

I am having design problems with date storage/retrieval using Python and SQLite.

I understand that a SQLite date column stores dates as text in ISO format (ie.

Answer 1

Note that SQLite itself does not have a native date/time type. As @unutbu answered, you can make the pysqlite/sqlite3 module try to guess (and note that it really is a guess) which columns/values are dates/times. SQL expressions will easily confuse it.

SQLite does have a variety of date time functions and can work with various strings, numbers in both unixepoch and julian format, and can do transformations. See the documentation:

http://www.sqlite.org/lang_datefunc.html

You may find it more convenient to get SQLite to do the date/time work you need instead of importing the values into Python and using Python libraries to do it. Note that you can put constraints in the SQL table definition for example requiring that string value be present, be a certain length etc.