title: How to store dates when some records have month/day/year while other records have just the year?
body: <p>I'm having difficulty deciding how to store release dates in my database of albums. Some albums have month, day, and year, but other albums have just the year. How can I store these release dates if I want to show both formats? I noticed that allmusic.com does this. My co-worker told me that he thinks they are storing the month, day, and year as separate fields in the database, but I imagine this would make it difficult to order the albums chronologically. Any recommendations on how this should be done? </p>
  
  <p>I am using MySQL, but I'm asking this as a general question about relational database design.</p>