Efficiency of SmallInt vs. SmallDatetime

I have a scheduling db (sql2000) that stores a lot of 'time' data and does
a lot of operations on this data. I'm storing event dates in a smalldatetime
field. I'm storing a 'starttime' in another smalldatetime field (eg. as
'1/1/1900 9:30') and 'endtime' in a third smalldatetime field ( eg. as
'1/1/1900 11:30').
Does anyone have any information/ideas on what performance improvements I
might see if was to instead store the 2 'time' fields as smallints (storing
number of minutes since midnight) rather than as smalldatetimes? I
understand I would halve the storage required, what about performance per
se?
Thanks,
Paul.Hi
Every row in a Table has an overhead of about 20 bytes. Saving a byte here
or there does not help much. You have to do a lot more processing to convert
your time to smallint and back (in your code).
Have you tested the difference? Functions like dateadd and datediff and not
avilable to you if you don't use DateTime datatypes.
Regards
Mike
"Paul W" wrote:
> I have a scheduling db (sql2000) that stores a lot of 'time' data and does
> a lot of operations on this data. I'm storing event dates in a smalldatetime
> field. I'm storing a 'starttime' in another smalldatetime field (eg. as
> '1/1/1900 9:30') and 'endtime' in a third smalldatetime field ( eg. as
> '1/1/1900 11:30').
> Does anyone have any information/ideas on what performance improvements I
> might see if was to instead store the 2 'time' fields as smallints (storing
> number of minutes since midnight) rather than as smalldatetimes? I
> understand I would halve the storage required, what about performance per
> se?
> Thanks,
> Paul.
>
>