[mysql] Converting a date in MySQL from string field

I'm using a system where the dates are stored as strings in the format dd/mm/yyyy. Is it possible to convert this to yyyy-mm-dd in a SELECT query (so that I can use DATE_FORMAT on it)? Does MySQL have a date parsing function?

Currently the only method I can think of is to concatenate a bunch of substrings, but hopefully there's a simpler solution.

(Unfortunately I can't convert the field to a true date field since it's a meta-table: the same column contains values for different fields that are just strings.)

STR_TO_DATE allows you to do this, and it has a format argument.

Yes, there's str_to_date

mysql> select str_to_date("03/02/2009","%d/%m/%Y");
+--------------------------------------+
| str_to_date("03/02/2009","%d/%m/%Y") |
+--------------------------------------+
| 2009-02-03                           |
+--------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

SELECT STR_TO_DATE(dateString, '%d/%m/%y') FROM yourTable...