Thanks all for your input - you're all correct, I don't really need to use timestamps as I am only interested in dates so will be reworking the app to use dates only. I still need to generate sequences of dates and really don't want to deal with DST, so my question is: can I add days to dates without converting to timestamp and adding 86400 for example. If I can it will make things much simpler. I am talking about doing this dynamically with php rather than at database level. Many thanks in advance, I will also start googling... -- http://www.web-buddha.co.uk