Best way to store date and month only in MySQL - mysql

Question

So I have to store a particular date of the year, any year. So I will only be needing the date and month part of a date.
I can either store it with any year and just ignore it on the programming side but that feels dirty. Any better way to handle this?
Closest I could find was this one but that includes time component as well and goes on some different tangent.

Answer 1

If you're using MySQL >= 5.7.6, you could use a generated column. A trivial example table would look like this (untested as, ironically, I don't have access to a recent MySQL server right now):
CREATE TABLE myTable (
the_date DATE,
month_date VARCHAR(5) AS CONCAT(MONTH(the_date), '-', DAY(the_date))
);
Of course, change the generated value according to your needs (different separator, padding with zeroes on the month, etc.)
If you're stuck with an older version, you could perform a similar conversion using a view.

Answer 2

What is wrong with just having a DATE column value, in this example called my_date :
SELECT MONTH(my_date) AS myMonth, DAY(my_date) AS myDay, <othercolumns>
FROM table WHERE id = 1
Then you can use your PHP to get your row and output $row['myMonth'], etc.
You can also output the MONTH / DAY values as any format string you like using MySQL DATE_FORMAT .
You can also CONCAT these two values if you need them in a single column.
SELECT CONCAT(MONTH(my_date),' ',DAY(my_date)) as month_day, <othercolumns>
FROM table WHERE id = 1
Warning:
Storing dates as 0000-00-00 is perfectly valid but MySQL year 0000 is not a leap year so you can not store 0000-02-29, this will instead be saved as a default 0000-00-00.
You might as well use a default year value that is leap year safe (such as year 2k) if you're sure you're never going to use the year value. such as (2000-XX-XX).

Answer 3

You could store the Julian Date as an integer, and convert to Georgian Month/Day when you need it. This can keep things quite clean. Keep your eyes peeled for the leap year.
The notion of Julian here is truly, just "Day of year" and converting when needed.
function getDateFromDay($dayOfYear, $year) {
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('z Y', strval($dayOfYear) . ' ' . strval($year));
return $date;
}