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Asked: 2026-05-11T11:55:04+00:00

I have a table structured like this: CREATE TABLE [TESTTABLE] ( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1)

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I have a table structured like this:

CREATE TABLE [TESTTABLE] (     [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,     [DateField] [datetime] NULL,     [StringField] [varchar](50),     [IntField] [int] NULL,     [BitField] [bit] NULL )

I execute the following code:

BEGIN     INSERT INTO TESTTABLE (IntField, BitField, StringField, DateField)     VALUES ('1', 1, 'hello', {ts '2009-04-03 15:41:27.378'});       SELECT SCOPE_IDENTITY()   END

And then 

select * from testtable with (NOLOCK)

and my result shows:

2009-04-03 15:41:27.*377*

for the DateField column.

Any ideas why I seem to be losing a millisecond??

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1 Answer

  1. SQL Server only stores time to approximately 1/300th of a second. These always fall on the 0, 3 and 7 milliseconds. E.g. counting up from 0 in the smallest increment:

    00:00:00.000
    00:00:00.003
    00:00:00.007
    00:00:00.010
    00:00:00.013
    …

    If you need that millisecond accuracy, there’s no pleasant way around it. The best options I’ve seen are to store the value in custom number fields and rebuild it every time you fetch the value, or to store it as a string of a known format. You can then (optionally) store an ‘approximate’ date in the native date type for the sake of speed, but it introduces a conceptual complexity that often isn’t wanted.

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