Use of SQL's prime reason is whatever you store is independent of what you can retrieve (format). That is view can be changed to whaterver format we wish to get from the stored data. Now when you store the date its like yyyy-mm-dd and now to retrieve in dd-mm-yyyy you can just use the following SQL so that you dont need to do anything fancy in PHP PHP: $sql = "SELECT DATE_FORMAT(date_column_name, '%d-%m-%Y') AS new_date FROM table_name WHERE...."; Also you can see the complete Description of DATE_FORMAT function here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/date-and-time-functions.html
