>>Hi,
>>
>>Once in a while when I look at my competitors databases (not necessarily VPF) I see that almost every table has a column of DateTime type indicating when the record was last time changed. My tables don't have such a column. Is it a good practice to have a DateTime column in every table to store when the record was last changed?
>
>If you intend to synchronize your data between two locations, it's a must. With proper timestamping (with identity and/or location of the operator) you can develop a nice cross-updating scheme. I had one in '97, worked just fine (except that they used modems and/or floppies to ship data, and that part never worked), another one in 2004 (to update remote SQL from local DBFs).
>
>The way it worked for me was to know the time of the last successfully sent package; next time, send only those records which were updated after that time. On target, you can have a conflict if someone else (person B) updated the record with a timestamp higher than the arriving one (made by person A). You can resolve it either way - by overwriting, ignoring, or comparing fields in the audit trail and writing changes made by person A only for fields which person B didn't update... or anywhere between these. It can get as complicated as you want :).

Dragan,

Thank you for your input.