Why I dislike MySQL: An example

[haggholm]

Postgres:

somedb=> select date('2009-05-27') + 7;
  ?column?  
------------
 2009-06-03
(1 row)

MySQL:

mysql> select date('2009-05-27') + 7;
+------------------------+
| date('2009-05-27') + 7 |
+------------------------+
|               20090534 | 
+------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

My current task, which involves date calculations on items in the database, is going to be a bit complicated by the fact that MySQL’s date arithmetic sophistication is such that it thinks that one week from today is May 34.

Update: I can, of course, and probably will use MySQL’s builtin functions (DATE_ADD() et al), but this forces me to use non-standard functions rather than standard SQL operations. (I will get away with this because, and only because, this module is restricted to MySQL only, unlike our core system.) Furthermore, I fail to see, if they have implemented the proper arithmetic in functions, why they left the operations with a completely idiotic default.