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Iso8601 sorts just as well.

I saw no benefit in storing two copies. That’s recipe for problems - e.g. “update” code that doesn’t update both, or somehow updates them differently (which one is right?). You can probably have t-sql or some “check” constraint to enforce equivalence, but ... why?

For most practical uses, an ISO8601 textual representation is as good, though a little less space efficient.



> Iso8601 sorts just as well.

No, it doesn’t, since all of the following are valid ISO 8601 representations of a date:

20210408 2021-04-07 2021-W14-1 2021W143 2021-097 2021098

(Now, consistently using any one of the ISO 8601 formats is sortable...)


Point taken.

I always recommend and use the specific ISO8601 format

    YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sssZ
(or drop the ".sss" if not needed), and be 100% consistent about it.

But you are right, I shouldn't refer to this as "use ISO8601" because it is only one of the numeous possible formats described by that spec.




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