This post shows how to work with DATETIME/DATE columns in DB and use Go standard time.Time avoiding manual string parsing. This article contains examples using 2 packages: database/sql and github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql.

Retrieve nullable time field using NullTime type

MySQL, PostgreSQL drivers in Go provide this nullable type which represents a time.Time

Use parseTime=true

Assuming you’re using the go-sql-driver/mysql you can ask the driver to scan DATE and DATETIME automatically to time.Time, by adding parseTime=true to your connection string.

It doesn’t work with TIME column type

Notice that this doesn’t work with current_time. If you must use current_time you’ll need to do the parsing by yourself.