From: hsv Date: July 23 2012 12:58pm Subject: YEAR and time types List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/227868 Message-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" A director s term ends in a given year, but at no given time of year; depends on the yearly meeting. I thought I would try YEAR to record it--but, in spite of http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/year.html , simply assigning NOW() to such a type does not work. There is also no implicit conversion to DATE. All in all, it behaves as a small integer, not a time type. For my end it is much less good than 'year-00-00', something already slightly obscure.