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AskSQLTeam
Ask SQLTeam Question
0 Posts |
 Posted - 2005-05-09 : 08:20:02
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| Oliver writes "How come datetime needs 4 bytes to store the number of days between 1.1.1753 and 31.12.999 and 4 bytes to store the number of milliseconds after midnight with accuracy of 3 milliseconds.It seems that with 2^31 you can count much further, right ?" |
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robvolk
Most Valuable Yak
15732 Posts |
Posted - 2005-05-09 : 08:23:38
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| I agree, but I couldn't tell you why they chose that. It probably has more to do with Sybase SQL Server (pre 7.0 SQL Server was based on Sybase), and changing the internal format would've caused too much aggravation.There is a practical reason for choosing 1753, because the Common Era calendar cannot be standardized for dates prior to that year.They were going to have a UTCDatetime type in SQL2005 which had a much greater range, but they had to drop it because of compatibility issues. |
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number of bytes to store a datetime variable