SQLite Forum

about "strict" mode
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SQL engines which do support DATE, TIME, or DATETIME don't store in the database the thing you put in the SQL command.  They convert it to an integer, and store that.  For the sake of argument, you could say that all DATEs are stored as days since 1 January 1970, and all TIMEs are stored as milliseconds after midnight.  When you ask for a value from a DATE or TIME field it gets produced as a string in one specific format.

So SQLite could introduce a DATE datatype by accepting only a string in one specific format.  A later version of SQLite could accept dates in another format too.  It just won't convert *into* the second format when you read a DATE value from a database.  It won't break compatibility, either backward or forward.