Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function returns the numeric value of the month (0–12) for the date provided. Since a date column can contain a zero value (e.g., '0000-00-00'), the function will return 0 for those situations. However, for nonzero invalid dates given, NULL is returned. Here is an example:

SELECT appointment AS 'Appointment',
MONTH(appointment) AS 'Month of Appointment'
FROM appointments
WHERE client_id = '8302'
AND appointment > CURRDATE( );

+-------------+----------------------+
| Appointment | Month of Appointment |
+-------------+----------------------+
| 2008-06-15  |                    6 | 
+-------------+----------------------+

This SQL statement is retrieving the month of any appointments after the current date for a particular client. There’s only one appointment, and it’s in June.