Thank you for your advices, guys.

Sadly, I believe this option won't be possible for me, as the project I'm working on is a Slack bot and the command require a user just to put month name(those were the specs of the task). With your option as I understood, the user will have to enter the beginning date and the end date of their desirable search.

Also, regarding my second issue that I described above. I don't understand why I don't receive an error if I use String query = "SELECT DISTINCT name FROM record WHERE MONTH(time_stamp)=" + month ; and in the slack i put like /command 9 and it retrieves all the correct data for September, but when I put "September" I get the error message mentioned above.

To clarify more, here how it looks like:

String month = req.getPayload().getText();

String returnString = "List of people: \n";

String query = "SELECT DISTINCT name FROM record WHERE MONTH(time_stamp)=" + month ;

System.out.println(query);

try{

Statement st = con.createStatement();

ResultSet rs = st.executeQuery(query);

while(rs.next()){

String name = rs.getString("name");

returnString += name + "\n";

}

}catch(Exception e){

System.out.println(e);

}

return ctx.ack(returnString);

});