There are two date classes in Java, one in java.util package and other in java.sql package. Though both are known as Date class, their are some difference between java.util.Date and java.sql.Date e.g. Former is used whenever a Date is required in Java application, while later is used to read and store DATE SQL type from database. There is one more important difference is, java.util.Date stores both date and time values, while java.sql.date only stores date information, without any time part. As per javadoc, java.sql.date is a thin wrapper around a millisecond value that allows JDBC to identify this as an SQL DATE value. To conform with the definition of SQL DATE, the millisecond values wrapped by a java.sql.Date instance must be 'normalized' by setting the hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds to zero in the particular time zone with which the instance is associated. See SQL date vs Util date for few more differences. In this Java tutorial, we will learn how to convert a java.util.Date to java.sql.Date, as we often need to do this when storing values into database. Since java.util.Date is standard way to represent date and time in Java, I only keep java.sql.Date up-to JDBC or DAO Layer, by the way if you need date with time, then use SQL TIMESTAMP type instead of DATE. It's also notable that java.sql.Date is subclass of java.util.Date, but it doesn't mean you can pass around this in place of java.util.Date, because it violates Liskov Substitution principle. All time related methods of java.sql.Date throws IllegalArgumentException, as shown below