New to Java

I'm rather new to Java, but as a UI designer I've managed to get wrangled into a Java-based project. Anyhow, my mission today is to find the best method of calculating a person's age in years. I will be obtaining the date from a database (using dbSwing), where it is stored in YYYY-MM-DD format as a date.

I can retrieve the value as a String, Date, or a few other types, but given the particular format of the stored value, I wasn't sure which would be best in passing as a parameter to the end method.

In summary, I need to take a YYYY-MM-DD date and compare it to the current date to obtain a person's age in years. I note that there are comments concerning 1970 and wasn't sure if any dates before that year would a problem in this calculation.

I've search about and not really found anything that seems to fit, but again, I'm quite new to the non-UI related parts of Java and any pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.