note 23771 deleted from function.date by dams

I spent some time on the date problem. I must say straight that PHP is a bit dumb here. While using ODBC to put the date into Access database the date was stored correctly in date/time field. Pulling it back however brings it to a dumb format of Y-m-d 00:00:00. The 00's are h:m:s. Unfortunately putting this value directly into DATE() function returns some date out of this century. Adding converting function strtodate() of course helps but it all limits the dates to dumb Windows limitation of 01-01-1970 and 19-01-2038. Did someone figure out a function that could easilly format output of any date? Is the string cutting the only option possible? If yes it is the least... J.