T-SQL Tip 20: Nice to Have Columns

You ever ask yourself:

“Hey self, who updated this row last?”

or

“When was this row updated last?”

Well bad news/good news.

Bad news.

SQL Server doesn’t store this by default.

Good news.

You can setup logic to store it anyways.

The way I store this is when I build a table I add a LastUpdated datetime column and an UpdatedBy varchar(70) column. I then set these so they have a default constraint of GETDATE() for LastUpdated and SYSTEM_USER for UpdatedBy. If you add these columns you can start to answer these questions, but you’ll also have to update these columns when you run an UPDATE statement.