At 10:55 AM 15/09/2003 +0000, you wrote:

>I have discovered that the value returned by current_timestamp is
>fixed within the scope of any given stored procedure call. So during
>the scope of such a call any directly (via a call to another
>procedure) or indirectly (via a trigger firing in response to record
>manipulations) called stored program units will also return the same
>value.

[massive snip]

Yup, this is according to the standard for CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.

At some point, you could get a fresh timestamp for each DML operation by
using CAST ('NOW' AS TIMESTAMP). I tested this with RC 5 with 10,000
updates in a single operation and it seems now to conform with
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. At some time past, it would give you the timestamp for
the discrete DML action.

You might like to test this on a slow connection...it's hard to tell on my
system, because it's very fast. The 10,000 updates were probably
subsecond. Since both CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and 'NOW' record the sub-second
portion as zero always, I really can't verify the case with 'NOW'.

If it turns out that 'NOW' is now exactly the same as CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
you could use the UDF GetExactTimestamp.

heLen


If it turns out