DATETIME2 In SQL Server

Randolph West continues his SQL Server date & time data types series:

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

This week, we look at the DATETIME2 data type. I’m not the first person to think that this was probably not the best name for a data type, but here we are, a decade later.

DATETIME2 is, at its heart, a combination of the DATE and TIME data types we covered in previous weeks. DATE is 3 bytes long and TIME is between 3 and 5 bytes long depending on accuracy. This of course means that DATETIME2 can be anything from 6 to 8 bytes in length.

Nowadays, if you want to store a date plus time, this should be your default, not DATETIME.