I am building a database for genealogical records which therefore needs to support a wide range of dates. I've checked the MySQL reference and am given to understand that all dates from 1000-01-01 onwards should be supported.
I am however having problems with non-recent dates in that they are not always being stored correctly when a record is saved. For example 1956-08-27 was being stored as 1956-08-29 and 1894-12-02 as 1901-12-13. In the process I have also noticed that the date type widget will only display a calendar back to January 1900 as if earlier dates are not supported.
I've worked around the problem for the time being by changing all date fields to type CHAR(10) and can write some validation functions if need be. Even so I thought I would still raise this as an issue in case it serves to highlight any bugs/problems.
Thanks,
Andrew.