Last week we talked about my Oracle migration to SQL Server and the vendor’s use of datetime over datetime2.  Today, I thought I would discuss the differences between the two datatypes.

First of all, datetime2 is recommended by Microsoft as opposed to datetime as it provides a larger data range, a larger default fractional precision as well as the optionally defined user precision level.  Datetime2 is also ANSI and ISO 8601 compliant, whereas datetime is not.  Which would you use?

Example:

Datetime2:  2012-06-25 12:45:10.1234567

Datetime:   2012-06-25 12:45:10.123

Books online reference:  datetime and datetime2.  Enjoy!