Reading a date in mysql can be frustrating, unless your brain is able to convert Dates from UNIXTIME formats. Let's see for example this scenario in Drupal:

SELECT * FROM `node` ORDER BY `node`.`created` DESC LIMIT 0 , 30

If you need to fetch, for example, when it was the last time that a node was created, this format doesn't help too much.

The solution is quite simple, FROM_UNIXTIME( field_with_date )

For example:

SELECT * , FROM_UNIXTIME( created ) FROM `node` ORDER BY `node`.`created` DESC LIMIT 0 , 30