>I came accross the timestamp datatype today. It sounds interesting (even though it wasn't what I thought<s>). My question is when does this value get updated for a row? Can I extract the timestamp data and present it as a datetime value? If someone could give me a good example when I would want to use the timestamp that would be great.
>
>Thanks,
>Einar

Einar,
Here what I read in a forum:

The SQL Server timestamp data type has nothing to do with times or dates. SQL Server timestamps are binary numbers that indicate the relative sequence in which data modifications took place in a database. The timestamp data type was originally implemented to support the SQL Server recovery algorithms.

It further states Never use timestamp columns in keys, especially primary keys, because the timestamp value changes every time the row is modified.

I am sure you read this in BOL, but just in case

timestamp is a data type that exposes automatically generated binary numbers, which are guaranteed to be unique within a database. timestamp is used typically as a mechanism for version-stamping table rows. The storage size is 8 bytes.
Remarks

The Transact-SQL timestamp data type is not the same as the timestamp data type defined in the SQL-92 standard. The SQL-92 timestamp data type is equivalent to the Transact-SQL datetime data type.

A future release of Microsoft® SQL Server™ may modify the behavior of the Transact-SQL timestamp data type to align it with the behavior defined in the standard. At that time, the current timestamp data type will be replaced with a rowversion data type.

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 introduces a rowversion synonym for the timestamp data type. Use rowversion instead of timestamp wherever possible in DDL statements. rowversion is subject to the behaviors of data type synonyms.

I am not sure if this behaviuor is changed in SQL Server 2005.