Current date and time defaults

For columns with the DATE, TIME, or TIMESTAMP data type, you can use CURRENT DATE, CURRENT TIME, or CURRENT TIMESTAMP as a default. The default you choose must be compatible with the column's data type.

Useful examples of the CURRENT DATE default

The CURRENT DATE default might be useful to record:

dates of phone calls in a contacts database
dates of orders in a sales entry database
the date a patron borrows a book in a library database

CURRENT TIMESTAMP

The CURRENT TIMESTAMP default is similar to the CURRENT DATE default, but offers greater accuracy. For example, a user of a contact management application may have several interactions with a single customer in one day: the CURRENT TIMESTAMP default would be useful to distinguish these contacts.

Since it records a date and the time down to a precision of millionths of a second, you may also find CURRENT TIMESTAMP useful when the sequence of events is important in a database.

DEFAULT TIMESTAMP

DEFAULT TIMESTAMP provides a way of indicating when each row in the table was last modified. When a column is declared with DEFAULT TIMESTAMP, a default value is provided for inserts, and the value is updated with the current date and time whenever the row is updated. To provide a default value on insert, but not update the column whenever the row is updated, use DEFAULT CURRENT TIMESTAMP instead of DEFAULT TIMESTAMP.