In facebook stream you’ll see the time period at the bottom of the stream. For example: 4 minutes ago, 2 days ago, 3 weeks ago…. In our recent project we have to show similar time fashion for our application’s activity stream. So I write a function to retrieve the time duration. In our mysql database, [...]

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I’ve been thinking a lot about invalid and zero temporal values and how to detect them with MySQL date and time functions because mk-table-checksum has to handle “everything” correctly and efficiently. The requirements are complex because we have to take into account what MySQL allows to be stored verses what it allows to be used in certain operations and functions, how it sorts a mix of real and invalid temporal values for MIN() and MAX(), how to detect a temporal value as equivalent to zero, and how different MySQL versions might affect any of the aforementioned.

At base, the four guiding requirements are:

1. Detect and discard invalid time, date, and datetime values
2. Detect zero-equivalent temporal values
3. Do #1 and #2 using only MySQL functions
4. Work in MySQL 4.0 …