I don't mean to be rude, but... Dates should be stored as dates, soring them as ints will cause you all manner of problems down the road. If you're the DBA and the rest of the team are developers, stand up for your data and let them know that dates are already stored as number, the number of days/hours/seconds/etc from some date depending on the dbms.

Let them reformat it however they want in the business or presentation layer, not at the data layer.

-Luke.