getdate()

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

You maybe working with a lot of data and inserting it into tables, and want to create a date stamp so you can see when the record was created.

Below we will take you through the steps of how to complete this in SQL server management studio.

In this table we have created a new column called “date_created”

We have altered this column to allow automatic date stamp creation as follows:

alter table dbo.CUSTOMER 
add constraint df_TABLE_DATE default getdate() for date_created

What the above code does is basically tell the database any time a new record is created, it should automatically add in a date to the column.

Note that the existing values will not change as I applied this update after the column creation.

Adding in a new record and checking that date stamp has been created

Using the below code:

Insert INTO dbo.CUSTOMER(CUSTOMER_NO,customer_type)
VALUES (777777,'web')

Yields the following result:

As can be seen now for the new record, the date has been added.

It is probably good, that when designing the database table, that this is factored in from the very start , otherwise you will have to go back and change lots of records, which will be very time consuming.