Does anyone else else think it's a waste to convert these strings to date/time objects for what is, in the end, a simple text transformation? If you're certain the incoming dates will be valid, you can just use:
>>> ddmmyyyy = "21/12/2008"
>>> yyyymmdd = ddmmyyyy[6:] + "-" + ddmmyyyy[3:5] + "-" + ddmmyyyy[:2]
>>> yyyymmdd
'2008-12-21'
This will almost certainly be faster than the conversion to and from a date.