It is a good practice to track when the data was inserted into a database or modified. However, relying on the backend applications to set that information correctly is error-prone. That’s why we can configure a MySQL table to automatically use the current timestamp as the default value and store that time as the row creation time.
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We have to do that when the table is created (or alter an existing table):
create table table_name (
...
created_ts timestamp default current_timestamp
);
Similarly, we can track the table update time. In this case, we have to use the on update clause:
updated_ts timestamp default current_timestamp on update current_timestamp
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