MySql difference between two timestamps in days?

Question

How can I get the difference between two timestamps in days? Should I be using a datetime column for this?

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I switched my column to datetime. Simple subtraction doesn't seem to give me a result in days.

mysql> SELECT NOW(), last_confirmation_attempt, NOW() - last_confirmation_attempt AS diff  FROM DateClubs HAVING diff IS NOT NULL ; +---------------------+---------------------------+-----------------+ | NOW()               | last_confirmation_attempt | diff            | +---------------------+---------------------------+-----------------+ | 2010-03-30 10:52:31 | 2010-03-16 10:41:47       | 14001084.000000 | +---------------------+---------------------------+-----------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) 

I don't think diff is in seconds, because when I divide diff by number of seconds in a day ( 86,400 ), I don't get a sensical answer:

mysql> SELECT NOW(), last_confirmation_attempt, ( NOW() - last_confirmation_attempt) / 86400 AS diff  FROM DateClubs HAVING diff IS NOT NULL ; +---------------------+---------------------------+----------------+ | NOW()               | last_confirmation_attempt | diff           | +---------------------+---------------------------+----------------+ | 2010-03-30 10:58:58 | 2010-03-16 10:41:47       | 162.0568402778 | +---------------------+---------------------------+----------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) 

Answer 1

If you're happy to ignore the time portion in the columns, DATEDIFF() will give you the difference you're looking for in days.

SELECT DATEDIFF('2010-10-08 18:23:13', '2010-09-21 21:40:36') AS days; +------+ | days | +------+ |   17 | +------+ 

Answer 2

I know is quite old, but I'll say just for the sake of it - I was looking for the same problem and got here, but I needed the difference in days.

I used SELECT (UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE1) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE2))/60/60/24 Unix_timestamp returns the difference in seconds, and then I just divide into minutes(seconds/60), hours(minutes/60), days(hours/24).