Gregory, Gregory Machin wrote: > I have a table with a timestamp column and would like to use his to > calculate the age of the record . how would i go about this... > I would also like to exicute a mysql stament that pasess the tables and > removes fields older than say 72 hours. how would i go about this . ? A timestamp is the time in seconds (since Jan 1 1970), so you can ascertain the age in seconds by subtracting the stored timestamp from the current timestamp. You can find the current timestamp in MySQL using the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() function. Once you have the age of the record, finding 72 hours is fairly trivial - 72 hours is 259200 seconds (72hrs * 60mins * 60secs). Therefore your query will be: DELETE FROM <TABLE> WHERE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() - <FIELD> > 259200 David -- David Grant http://www.grant.org.uk/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php