mysql: searching BETWEEN dates stored as varchar

Question

i would like to select * from table where dates between (some_date and another_date)

the problem is that the dates are stored as varchar!

Answer 1

You want to search between dates, store them as dates. By storing them as strings you're shooting yourself in the foot. You'd basically need to extract date part from the string (using SUBSTR() or LEFT() ) and parse it to date format (using STR_TO_DATE()).

The performance of such solution will be appaling.

STR_TO_DATE(LEFT(reporttime,LOCATE(' ',reporttime)),'%m/%d/%Y') BETWEEN '2010-07-28' AND '2010-07-29'