selecting rows that are older than current date in mysql

Question

I have a mysql table with fields for a start and end date/time.

How would i select just the rows that are older than the current date using php.

The format of the end-date is 2009-11-25 08:01:00 and the field type is datetime

Answer 1

Provided timestamps and the MySQL are in the same timezone, you can just compare to NOW().

SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE date_col < NOW()

Answer 2

It might look something like:

$result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE datefield < NOW()');
if (! $result) { die(mysql_error()); }
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    // handle contents of $row
}
mysql_free_result($result);

Answer 3

Your SQL query would resemble:

SELECT *
  FROM your_table t
 WHERE t.end-date < CURDATE()

There's various synonyms supported to get the current date - NOW(), SYSDATE()...

Reference: MySQL date related functions