I often find myself in need of inserting data manually into a MySQL database using some kind of database editor. In a database editor you find yourself manually inserting values into cells of a table and in most of them you are not allowed to enter an SQL expression (the MySQL Query Browser is a prime example). In this case I need some way to generate the current date and time as per the MySQL format quickly on the command line. I will usually use:
alias date_mysql="date +'%F %T'"