Question

I am in the process of migrating a SQL 2008 R2 database between software versions (6 years old to current schema.) There are a few auditing tables with SQL TimeStamp columns on them. Am doing this by copying data out of original tables into the new structure – the change is fairly complex as you might expect after 6 years.

Is there a way to preserve the fingerprint of the timestamps as I move it into a new database or a best practise way of keeping the audit traceability of this data?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can convert a timestamp to varbinary(8) to preserve it:

select  cast([timestamp] as varbinary(8))

But the value of timestamp itself is not particularly useful: it does not translate to a particular time. In the future, MSDN suggests it might be renamed to the more appropriate rowversion.