I would have to describe this as a hack rather than anything else as the convert function wouldn't work for me and date() is not supported, i.e. you can't use "SELECT date(timestamp_field) from db"; to extract only the date element; whereas you can use year(timestamp_field) or month(timestamp_field).

I needed to filter records based on the date, to extract rows from the table where the date was equal to today. The date field in the table was a datetime column. My workaround was to use the left function and extract the ten characters of the date which I could then compare to today as in the following.

$query = "SELECT title, contents FROM articles WHERE left(timestamp_field,10) = '$date'";

This worked. I don't think it's the elegant solution, alternatives welcomed.