DATEDIFF

Randolph West continues a series on covering dates and times, looking at DATEDIFF and DATEDIFF_BIG:

The only functional difference between them is that the DATEDIFF_BIG() returns values as a BIGINT, for results that exceed the boundary of an INT. Keep this in mind when deciding which one to use. For example, the maximum number of seconds an INT can hold is 68 years, while a BIGINT can comfortably store the number of seconds in 10,000 years. This becomes especially important when dealing with microseconds and nanoseconds.

The rest of the post will use DATEDIFF() to refer to both functions.

I think this might be the first time I’d read about DATEDIFF_BIG()and I’m not aware of ever having used it.  But hey, it could make sense if you need to track more than 2 billion microseconds.