Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function returns the name of the day for the date provided. As of MySQL version 5.1.15, the lc_time_names system variable will be consulted to determine the actual set of names to use. Use the SET statement to change this variable. See MySQL’s documentation page on MySQL Server Locale Support (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/locale-support.html) for a list of locale values available for time names. Here is an example:

SELECT appt_date AS Appointment,  
DAYNAME(appt_date) AS 'Day of Week'
FROM appointments
WHERE appt_id = '1439';

+---------------------+-------------+
| Date of Appointment | Day of Week |
+---------------------+-------------+
| 2008-03-14          | Friday      | 
+---------------------+-------------+

SET lc_time_names = 'it_IT';

SELECT appt_date AS Appointment,  
DAYNAME(appt_date) AS ''Day of Week in Italian'
FROM appointments
WHERE appt_id = '1439';

+---------------------+------------------------+
| Date of Appointment | Day of Week in Italian |
+---------------------+------------------------+
| 2008-03-14          | venerdì                | 
+---------------------+------------------------+

For this example, I have set character_set_client, character_set_connection, and character_set_results to utf8, and set my terminal program to UTF-8 characters. Incidentally, the day of the week here is in lowercase because this is how it’s written in Italian.