The Difference Between the DATETIME and SMALLDATETIME Data Types
Posted on October 4th, 2008 in Data, Nuggets, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 | No Comments »
DATETIME requires 8 bytes of storage and stores dates from 1/1/1753 to 12/31/9999. It is accurate to about 3 milliseconds.
SMALLDATETIME requires only 4 bytes of storage. It can stores dates from 1/1/1900 to 6/6/2079 and is accurate to 1 minute.
If you’re not in the mood to wade through BOL, you can find a quick overview with a fair amount of detail on SQL Server datatypes here.