MySQL Query GROUP BY day / month / year

Question

Is it possible I make a simple query to count how many records I have in a determined period of time like a Year, month or day, having a TIMESTAMP field, like:

SELECT COUNT(id)
FROM stats
WHERE record_date.YEAR = 2009
GROUP BY record_date.YEAR

Or even:

SELECT COUNT(id)
FROM stats
GROUP BY record_date.YEAR, record_date.MONTH

To have a monthly statistic.

Thanks!

Answer 1

GROUP BY DATE_FORMAT(record_date, '%Y%m')

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Note (primarily, to potential downvoters). Presently, this may not be as efficient as other suggestions. Still, I leave it as an alternative, and a one, too, that can serve in seeing how faster other solutions are. (For you can't really tell fast from slow until you see the difference.) Also, as time goes on, changes could be made to MySQL's engine with regard to optimisation so as to make this solution, at some (perhaps, not so distant) point in future, to become quite comparable in efficiency with most others.