MySQL Query GROUP BY day / month / year

Question

Is it possible to make a simple query to count how many records I have in a determined period of time like a year, month, or day, having a TIMESTAMP field, like

Answer 1

If you want to filter records for a particular year (e.g. 2000) then optimize the WHERE clause like this:

SELECT MONTH(date_column), COUNT(*)
FROM date_table
WHERE date_column >= '2000-01-01' AND date_column < '2001-01-01'
GROUP BY MONTH(date_column)
-- average 0.016 sec.

Instead of:

WHERE YEAR(date_column) = 2000
-- average 0.132 sec.

The results were generated against a table containing 300k rows and index on date column.

As for the GROUP BY clause, I tested the three variants against the above mentioned table; here are the results:

SELECT YEAR(date_column), MONTH(date_column), COUNT(*)
FROM date_table
GROUP BY YEAR(date_column), MONTH(date_column)
-- codelogic
-- average 0.250 sec.

SELECT YEAR(date_column), MONTH(date_column), COUNT(*)
FROM date_table
GROUP BY DATE_FORMAT(date_column, '%Y%m')
-- Andriy M
-- average 0.468 sec.

SELECT YEAR(date_column), MONTH(date_column), COUNT(*)
FROM date_table
GROUP BY EXTRACT(YEAR_MONTH FROM date_column)
-- fu-chi
-- average 0.203 sec.

The last one is the winner.