The Date Data Type

Randolph West continues his dates and times series:

QL Server 2008 introduced new data types to handle dates and times in a more intelligent way than the previous DATETIME and SMALLDATETIME types that we looked at previously.

The first one we look at this week is DATE. Whereas DATETIME uses eight bytes and SMALLDATETIME uses four bytes  to store their values, DATE only needs a slender three bytes to store any date value between 0001-01-01 and 9999-12-31inclusive.

The DATE data type was a fantastic addition to SQL Server 2008.