Question

I have two byte[] (like this { 0, 0, 0, 0, 52, 246, 141, 6 }) that represent two Oracle’s timestamps.
How do I know which one is older?

Answer 1

Convert the binary timestamp to Int64 and then compare the corresponding long values:

var value = new byte[] { 0, 0, 0, 0, 52, 246, 141, 6 };
long timestamp = BitConverter.ToInt64(value, 0);

The bigger the long value, the more recent the timestamp. I haven’t used Oracle but I would guess this represents the number of ticks since the Epoch.