Formating the display of a post's date, outside the Loop

Question

I'm using this function to be able to retrieve several data, from outside the Loop:

function get_post_data($postId) {
 global $wpdb;
 return $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE ID=$postId");
}

... and then, this to display the date a post was published:

<?php 
global $wp_query;
global $thePostID;
$thePostID = $wp_query->post->ID;
$data = get_post_data($thePostID);
echo $data[0]->post_date;
?>

wich displays something like "2010-06-14 22:36:03" in my sidebar, but I'd like to format it like just "June, 2010"

Can it be done?

Answer 1

I'm using something like this:

date('F, Y', strtotime($data[0]->post_date));