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What is the difference between Timestamp
and Datetime
SQL Server?
I thought Both formats are capable of storing date + time. Then, Where the difference is lying between them?
But Timestamp
is not capable of storing date, time information.
Still Whats the difference?
According to the documentation,
timestamp
is a synonym forrowversion
- it's automatically generated and guaranteed1 to be unique.datetime
isn't - it's just a data type which handles dates and times, and can be client-specified on insert etc.1 Assuming you use it properly, of course. See comments.
Datetime is a datatype.
Timestamp is a method for row versioning. In fact, in sql server 2008 this column type was renamed (i.e. timestamp is deprecated) to rowversion. It basically means that every time a row is changed, this value is increased. This is done with a database counter which automatically increase for every inserted or updated row.
For more information:
http://www.sqlteam.com/article/timestamps-vs-datetime-data-types
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182776.aspx