Delete field after X days?

[accurax]

I have a table containing user created data, and once this data is 30 days old id like to delete it from my database.

Whent the data is uploaded initially i add date(Y-m-d); to my database, however i cant get my head around how to add 30 days to this and check it.

so, i was considering creating another field to hold a unix timestamp when the data is uploaded, then simply seeing if this field was less than the current timestamp minus 2592000 (30 days in seconds).

Can anyone help me do this a better way?

Or is the timestamp method fine?

[vaaaska]

There is alot of help in the manual about this...read the date() and time() entries.

Deleting things this way will require a cron file...run it once a day to the script that does the deleting and all will be good.

[Weedpacket]

There's also strtotime() .... but I'm inclined towards storing the upload time and querying that to see if it's more than 30 days in the past as preferable. For one thing, it would be trivial to change that to a different figure later (say, 21 days) whereas the other approach would require recalculating the new expiry date for every record in the table.

[bradgrafelman]

Why not let MySQL do the work?

DELETE FROM `myTable` where `date_field` < CURDATE() + INTERVAL 30 DAY