Here’s a quick, easy, and painless way in PHP to convert MSSQL’s nasty datetime format to a nice Unix Timestamp:
$MSSQLdatetime = “Feb 7 2009 09:48:06:697PM”;
$newDatetime = preg_replace(‘/:[0-9][0-9][0-9]/’,”,$MSSQLdatetime); // strip fractional seconds
$time = strtotime($newDatetime);
echo $time.”\n”;
Just did it for 4 columns in ~110,000 rows, (a little less than half a million times) and it seems to have worked just dandy.