Notes, How Tos, Things To Remember, Things I'll soon forget

After doing some more digging (must have been blind before), I found that SQLite supports a default timestamp at insert. Here is an example of a create statement using the default with SQLite CURRENT_TIMESTAMP keyword. create table user ( id integer primary key, username text not null, password text not null, first_name text, last_name text, created text default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP UNIQUE(username) ); That is much easier that my previous attempt. Not sure how I missed it. But it doesn't solve the missing now() function for updates. ( did find a language solution for that in Perl but that is for another post). In that case, it will still require the use of datetime('now') . Reference: SQLite CREATE TABLE reference .

2 ways to get SQLite to put dates into a column. insert into mytable values( null, datetime('now') ); insert into mytable values( null, strftime('%s', 'now')); The first one inserts a row somewhat like this: 1|2009-03-10 18:47:46 The second inserts an unix timestamp: 2|1236711411 It might be best to use that unix timestamp with an integer column type for dates since SQLite doesn't support a datetime one. It makes comparisons and ordering much easier: select * from dt where lu > strftime('%s', '2009-03-10'); Output of: id|lu 6|1236643200 2|1236711411 3|1236711516 4|1236711518 5|1236711519 But the formatting is pretty ugly. :-/ Hey what about formatting it within the select with the SQLite datetime function: select id, datetime(lu, 'unixepoch') lu from dt order by lu; id|lu 6|2009-03-10 00:00:00 2|2009-03-10 18:56:51 3|2009-03-10 18:58:36 4|2009-03-10 18:58:38 5|2009-03-10 18:58:39 Better but having to add that to each select is kin...