The Internals of DATETIME2

Chad Baldwin digs in:

I noticed in sys.column_store_segments the min_data_id and max_data_id columns store very large bigint values in the segments for datetime2 columns. After doing a bit more googling and tinkering, I found for bit/tinyint/smallint/int/bigint it stores the min/max of the actual values rather than dictionary lookup values. So I assume it’s likely doing the same for date/time/datetime/datetime2 and storing some sort of bigint representation of the actual value.

This post is going to focus on datetime2(7) datatypes mainly because that’s what I was dealing with. Though I’m sure it wouldn’t be much work to figure out the other types.

Click through to learn more about the datatype and see how this wraps into a discussion of temporal table cleanup and columnstore indexes.