What are best practices for converting time data from a SQL database into Unix timestamps for graph generation in PHP?

When converting time data from a SQL database into Unix timestamps for graph generation in PHP, it is important to ensure that the time data is in a format that can be easily converted. One common practice is to store timestamps in the database as Unix timestamps to avoid conversion issues. If the time data is stored in a different format, you can use PHP's strtotime() function to convert it to a Unix timestamp before graph generation.

// Assuming $row['time_data'] contains the time data from the SQL database
$unix_timestamp = strtotime($row['time_data']);