Milliseconds wrong when converting from XML to SQL Server datetime
Yes, SQL Server
rounds time to 3.(3)
milliseconds:
SELECT CAST(CAST('2009-01-01 00:00:00.000' AS DATETIME) AS BINARY(8))SELECT CAST(CAST('2009-01-01 00:00:01.000' AS DATETIME) AS BINARY(8))0x00009B84000000000x00009B840000012C
As you can see, these DATETIME
's differ by 1
second, and their binary representations differ by 0x12C
, that is 300
in decimal.
This is because SQL Server
stores the time
part of the DATETIME
as a number of 1/300
second ticks from the midnight.
If you want more precision, you need to store a TIME
part as a separate value. Like, store time rounded to a second as a DATETIME
, and milliseconds or whatever precision you need as an INTEGER
in another columns.
This will let you use complex DATETIME
arithmetics, like adding months or finding week days on DATETIME
's, and you can just add or substract the milliseconds and concatenate the result as .XXXXXX+HH:MM
to get valid XML
representation.
Because of the precision issues mentioned by Quassnoi if you have the option to use use SqlServer 2008 you can consider using datetime2 datatype or if you are only concerned about the time part you can use time datatype
Date and Time Data Types - lists all the types and theirs accuracy
In Sql Server 2005 if I needed precision of 1 millisecond I would add an extra column milisecond of type int to store the number of miliseconds and remove the miliseconds part from the dateTime column (set it to 000). That assuming that you need the date information as well.