If you're planning to accept orders from customers in other countries, inserting a date with a nonstandard format into your database could cause serious problems. Customers' credit cards could be rejected based on incorrect expiration dates. Orders could be delivered late, or not at all. And bank transactions could go through at unexpected times. The solution is to standardize your applications and databases on one date format.
Date formats can be tricky.
With international applications, or even applications that need to work with more than one database system, inconsistencies across date formats can be a major pitfall. What's worse, the supported date formats may not be familiar to your users. If you're using a database system that's flexible with date formats, the answer is no. You can avoid having to convert dates in your Web applications and rely on the database to do the work. Other Ways to Manipulate Dates .