MySQL compare DATE string with string from DATETIME field

Use the following:

SELECT * FROM `calendar` WHERE DATE(startTime) = '2010-04-29'

Just for reference I have a 2 million record table, I ran a similar query. Salils answer took 4.48 seconds, the above took 2.25 seconds.

So if the table is BIG I would suggest this rather.

If you want to select all rows where the DATE part of a DATETIME column matches a certain literal, you cannot do it like so:

WHERE startTime = '2010-04-29'

because MySQL cannot compare a DATE and a DATETIME directly. What MySQL does, it extends the given DATE literal with the time '00:00:00'. So your condition becomes

WHERE startTime = '2010-04-29 00:00:00'

Certainly not what you want!

The condition is a range and hence it should be given as range. There are several possibilities:

WHERE startTime BETWEEN '2010-04-29 00:00:00' AND '2010-04-29 23:59:59'
WHERE startTime >= '2010-04-29' AND startTime < ('2010-04-29' + INTERVAL 1 DAY)

There is a tiny possibility for the first to be wrong - when your DATETIME column uses subsecond resolution and there is an appointment at 23:59:59 + epsilon. In general I suggest to use the second variant.

Both variants can use an index on startTime which will become important when the table grows.