Amazon thinks "12/2015" is a good way to return a date field. How to save to DB now?

Good evening,

my beloved Amazon (I really like them!! :-)) provide monthly reports. And for each month, the provide a date if you list - say - the last 12 months. And they seriously provide the month in "mm/yyyy" format, e.g. "12/2015".

Obviously, I dont want to store this as a string in the DB but as a date field.

Now I was thinking about the best ways how to tackle this.

• 1)The obvious solution: A model mutator. Well, long story short - I am insertin the data via

DB::table($tableName)->insert($requestStatus->parsedResponse);

because I am talking potentially thousands of rows and also I am using composite keys which Laravel unfortunately does not support...

• 2)Store as string (arg) and use a mutator when RETRIEVING the model. Not nice but that could work
• 3)Manipulate the value before it is inserted into the DB. I dont like this one because I have several reports which I am processing with a handful of fully report-agnostic methods and I wouldnt like to start changing this.
• 4)...any other options? Like changing the date format of MySQL? :-)

Your insights are - as always - very welcome :-)

Thanks Andreas