Question

I would like to know how to store time in C# and T-SQL. I know that both of them provide a DateTime type but I just need to store a time. For instance:

var startTime = 9PM;
var endTime = 10PM;

And then store/retrieve this values from a database. Thanks in advance.

Francesco

Answer 1

C#

Whether to use a DateTime or TimeSpan type in C# to store 9 PM is up to taste. Personally, I’d use DateTime, leaving the date component empty, since that’s semantically closer to what you want. (A TimeSpan is designed to hold time intervals, such as “21 hours”.)

The documentation supports both options. This is from the documentation of TimeSpan:

The TimeSpan structure can also be used to represent the time of day, but only if the time is unrelated to a particular date.

On the other hand, the MSDN article Choosing Between DateTime, DateTimeOffset, and TimeZoneInfo mentions the following:

The DateTime structure is suitable for applications that do the following:
* Work with dates only.
* Work with times only.
[…]

---

T-SQL

SQL Server has a time data type.