How do I express the current year in the following calculation? I've readed masses of notes but can't find this answer.

I have to find horses over 15 years old. horse_born is the column containing the horse's year of birth:

SELECT horse_id, horse_name
FROM horse
WHERE "expression for current year" - horse_born >15

After extensive searching I found the following page.
The year function looked particularly relevant.

To add to Mike's suggestion try using curdate() or now() to get today's date or date/time.

please, don't use those

use these instead -- CURRENT_DATE, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

they are totally equivalent, ~and~ they will also work in other database systems, thus making your code portable and not dependent on proprietary mysql syntax

don't do a calculation involving the column value, the database engine won't be able to optimize the query

instead, put the column value on one side of the comparison operator, and do the calculation on the other side --

WHERE horse_born < YEAR(CURRENT_DATE) - INTERVAL 15 YEAR

I think I preferred it when we provided NZDF solutions to homework questions rather than high efficiency multi-platform solutions. It was also far more fun.

i believe that i did

I obviously wasn't paying enough attention in class then

so i guess this was a good nzdf then?

oh definitely - keep up the good work

nzdf - what does this mean? I googled it and found New Zealand Defense Force and New Zealand Drillers Federation - though I don't think either apply here

NZDF is a term which was first coined here in these very forums by, ahem, yours truly

it stands for Non-Zero Deviosity Factor, and refers to the practice of responding to certain requests for homework assistance with an answer that is devious to some extent

obviously, a student struggling with a homework problem, who makes a game attempt, and shows his work, and discusses what he's tried and what concepts he's having trouble with, is going to receive answers largely devoid of any deviosity

the idea is that the larger the deviosity, the more likely it is that the student will get into trouble if he hands in the answer he obtained here

and it's particularly effective if the answer actually happens to work correctly, but in a way so devious that the student doesn't twig onto the ruse but the teacher surely will

can you see what the NZDF was in this thread?

LOL - of course as a student once I was more intent on getting the solution working, less about performance and cross platform compatibility. I like it - NZDF!! I will have to use this too!!

I wonder whether we should have a monthly award for the best response. The only danger with NZDF is that some future associate might look for your name on the web and come up with the code and just think WTF?

pat would win it in a cakewalk every month

i've never seen anybody come even close to his level of deviosity