Astra (info@NoEmail.com) writes:
> My end user wants to see a simple list of the details in these tables
> (individually - no joins present here), but sorted from most recently
> updated to never touched.
>
> As the timestamp seems to update each time a transaction hits it I though
> this would be perfect, but I've had the following mixed results:
>
> 1) I did a simple ORDER BY TIMESTAMP DESC, but because the order is
> alphanumeric I don't get a true 'recent to old' list.
>
> 2) So I did ORDER BY CAST(TIMESTAMP AS INT) DESC. There is a numeric
> sort now, but the timestamp values seem to be hit and miss so that an
> account that I know should be near the top is around about the middle.

Since timestamp is 8 bytes and int only 4, a cast to int could lead to
funny things.

On the other hand, ORDER BY TIMESTAMP DESC will give you the rows in
some order that pertains to updates - and inserts. But it can be a bit
rough. Say that you at some point reloaded the table because of some
maintenance thing, that gave you new timestamp values.

So you are probably better off adding a "moddate" column, which you
update in case of "true" updates, either through stored procedures or a
trigger.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp