INT(11) or DATETIME for timestamp ?

Yii 2.0 General Discussions
1

I use DATETIME to store timestamp. I see Yii 2.0 use INT(11) to store timestamp.

  • which is better for MySQL ?

  • which is easier to "filter" (e.g. GridView, I want to find records that is greater or lesser than a certain date) ?

2

this is a very relative question… but I’d use int (unsigned) simply because unix timestamps are ints.

3

It also depends on what you want to store. Unfortunately I can’t link to a stackoverflow answer to this topic.

A difference between unix-timestamp and DateTime is, that DateTime represents "just" a date like in calendar and the timestamp is an exact point in time. The difference is important when you handle timezones.

4

Like Andrew McWhite said… it depends what you want to achieve.

Google for "datetime vs timestamp" to get a understanding what the differences are.

Then you can decide better what you want to use. ;)

I personally use timestamps for all created_at / updated_at attributes.

Regards