Number of days between current date and date field

Question

I have this problem if anyone can help. There is a field (date) in my table (table1) that is a date in the format 3/31/1988 (M/D/y), and my necessity is to define how many days have passed since that date.

I have tried to give this instruction

SELECT DATEDIFF(CURDATE(), date) AS days
FROM table1

But it gives back 'null' and I think this happens because the two date formats are different (CURDATE() is YMD.....

Is it correct? can anyone help me? Thank you in advance

Answer 1

You can use STR_TO_DATE():

SELECT DATEDIFF(CURDATE(),STR_TO_DATE(date, '%m/%d/%Y')) AS days
FROM table1

SQLFiddle Demo

Answer 2

Your DATE field should have DATE or DATETIME format to be used as DATEDIFF argument correctly.

Also DATE is MySQL keyword and I am not sure that you can use it as valid field name.