As a bit of a sidebar... unless this formatting you want to do is strictly for output to a file, you should let the GUI do date formatting so that local "regional" settings will correctly format the date according to the region of the world the user is in. It also takes a bit of a load off the server. If the GUI is a report generator, let that do the formatting as well. For goodness sake, NEVER store formatted dates in the database because you will have to do conversions implicitly or explicitly to do even the simplest of date math in the future.