Date And Time Functions To Avoid

Randolph West shares his thoughts on three functions he’d rather you avoid:

CURRENT_TIMESTAMP is the ANSI-equivalent of GETDATE(). ANSI is an acronym for the American National Standards Institute, and sometimes vendors will include ANSI functions in their products so they can say that they’re ANSI-compliant (which is not a bad thing, in most cases).

There are three main problems with CURRENT_TIMESTAMP:

• No brackets. It goes against the rules about functions. So much for standards!
• It’s functionally equivalent to GETDATE(), which uses DATETIME, which we previously identified is old and bad.
• It’s too similar to the poorly-named TIMESTAMP data type, which has nothing to do with dates and times and should be called ROWVERSION.

Bottom line: don’t use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.

At one point I used CURRENT_TIMESTAMP over GETDATE() with the thought of portability in mind.  Since then, my thoughts on code portability have changed and regardless, as Randolph mentions, it’s better to use DATETIME2 functions to avoid precision issues with DATETIME.