if you use ticks, you can store it as a data type: INTEGER or TEXT in SQLite. However, my recommendation when dealing with dates in SQLite is to always store the date in this format: yyyymmdd or perhaps yyyy-mm-dd. This way, you can do all kind of date manipulation like between >=, <=, etc. You can also easily sort by date. The number is smaller that ticks, so it is easily recognizable as a date.