Let’s Not Talk About Timestamp

Randolph West hits us with a misnamed SQL Server data type:

It occurred to me that we haven’t covered the TIMESTAMP data type in this series about dates and times.

TIMESTAMP is the Windows Millennium Edition of data types. It has nothing to do with date and time. It’s a row version. Microsoft asks that we stop calling it TIMESTAMP and use ROWVERSION instead.

Much like DECIMAL is a synonym of NUMERIC, so too is TIMESTAMP a synonym of ROWVERSION. Please call it a ROWVERSION and pretend that TIMESTAMP doesn’t exist. Microsoft is deeply sorry for the confusion.

As I say, dates and times are hard.  But at least this is easy:  if you don’t use it, you won’t have problems with it.