Some tips on the system defined data type timestamp

[somnath74]

Can someone please let me know what exactly can the datatype timestamp(which is defined as a user type) be used for.As I understand it is stored as varbinary (8).A little more detailed explanation on top of what is provided in the Syabase ASE 11.5 T-SQL manual would be much help.

TIA

Somnath

 

[foxdev]

For all practical purposes, think of it as a "row version" identifier. It is changed each time the row is updated. It is unique within a given database.

One use for it is to check if updates have been made to a row since you last fetched it (especially useful on the client side, where you don't want to lock the row); simply comparing the original and current values of the timestamp column for a given row will tell you if anyone else has changed the row.