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I'm wonder if it's safe to compare the values of timestamp in a table to get the newly updated/inserted rows. (e.g. SQL Server RowVersion/Timestamp - Comparisons).

What will happen if timestamp reaches the maximum value of binary(8) in a very very large/frequently updating database?

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1 Answers1

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It won't.

If you do a million updates a second, every second, the timestamp will wrap around in about 585000 years.

Guffa
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  • It won't happen. But still, just by mere curiosity, does SQL Server handle this in some way? – Guillermo Gutiérrez Oct 23 '13 at 14:55
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    @guillegr123: I looked for a while now, and I can't find any documentation for that. I found a claim that it would actually wrap around to zero in an answer, but there is no reference to any documentation to back it up. http://stackoverflow.com/a/547782/69083 – Guffa Oct 23 '13 at 19:06