I am currently part of a team designing a site that will potentially have thousands of users who will be doing a number of date related searches. During the design phase we have been trying to determine which makes more sense for performance optimization.

Should we store the datetime field as a mysql datetime. Or should be break it up into a number of fields (year, month, day, hour, minute, ...)

The question is with a large data set and a potentially large set of users, would we gain performance wise breaking the datetime into multiple fields and saving on relying on mysql date functions? Or is mysql already optimized for this?