How to get today’s date in a MySQL query

MySQL is a relational database management system used to manage the data of a database and it stores all of the data of a website/application in the form of tables which can be managed by using a query language known as SQL. MySQL supports many built-in clauses and functions which help the users to get the results efficiently.

There are different ways in MySQL through which we can find out today’s date using a single query. In this post, all the approaches through which we can find out today’s date are being discussed in detail.

How to get today’s date in a query in MySQL

There are different ways through which we can find out the present date, some of them are:

Using the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()
Using the NOW()
Using the CURDATE()

These are all explained in detail.

Today’s date using the CURDATE() function in MySQL

The other way to find the present date in MySQL is by using the function of CURDATE() with SELECT clause, for example:

SELECT CURDATE();

The output displayed the current date, we can also use the synonym of curdate that is “CURRENT_DATE()”:

SELECT CURRENT_DATE;

Today’s date using the NOW() function in MySQL

This is the built-in function that will return the present date and time in MySQL, we can use it with the SELECT clause, for example:

SELECT NOW();

If we want to extract only the present date from the function of NOW(), use the DATE() function along with the NOW() function, for example:

SELECT DATE(NOW());

We can see from the output, the present date has been extracted from the NOW() function using the DATE() function.

Today’s date using the Current_timestamp() function in MySQL

The current_timestamp() is used to return the current time and date in MySQL, for example:

SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP();

If we want to extract only date from it, then we can use the DATE() function with it:

SELECT DATE(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP());

From the above output, we have extracted the date.

Conclusion

MySQL is enriched with a lot of functions which make it very much easy for its users to perform their tasks efficiently. One of its examples is discussed in this post, if you are working on a MySQL database and want to access the date then it allows you some of the functions with which you can find out today’s date by simply running a query. In this post, we have discussed different functions and their usages through which we can find out today’s date easily in MySQL.