Re: Timestamp Column. -Reply

You are correct and kudos for a very good explanation for an often confusing issue. Robert Wines > Nils Myklebust wrote: snip: > Yes, but to me this isn't a timestamp. It's two different words, and I > believe they represent to different consepts. > I think a datetime is simply a column that can contain a value > representing an instance in time with a specified resolution. > A timestamp however is allways something that represents relative > time. That is one allways use a timestamp to be able to say that > something occured before or after something else in time. True this > can be implemented using a datetime column, but it's more common to > use some kind of integer that is simply increased by 1 for every > occurence of whatever you want to track. This something may be the > updating of a single row in a table (the occurence to track beeing: > Did an update occur to this row after I read it last?), the start of a > backup (to track whether a page in the database was changed after > the backup started) or any number of other things.