I have a string column which acts as a date and I want to select it as a date.
Is it possible?
My sample data format would be; month/day/year -> 12/31/2011


Cevap:

SELECT  STR_TO_DATE(yourdatefield, '%m/%d/%Y')
FROM    yourtable

You can also handle these date strings in WHERE clauses. For example

SELECT whatever
  FROM yourtable
 WHERE STR_TO_DATE(yourdatefield, '%m/%d/%Y') > CURDATE() - INTERVAL 7 DAYS

You can handle all kinds of date / time layouts this way. Please refer to the format specifiers for the DATE_FORMAT() function to see what you can put into the second parameter to STR_TO_DATE()
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/date-and-time-functions.html#function_date-format