Add modified dates to db records?

[RobBoeckermann]

in addition to start/end dates

[jsteuver]

I thought the idea behind including the start/end dates was so that we could have the history for the record and use the start/end dates as effectively a DateModified field.

If a change is made to a record, we would populate the end date of the current record with the date/time the record was changed, and then add a new record (modified from the original record) with the start date set to this date/time as well. We would then have two records: the original record (which has an end date, indicating that it is no longer the most current record) and the new record (which has the start date of when it was modified, but no end date, indicating that it is the current record). The start date of the new record would effectively act as a DateModified field.

That was my understanding of how the start/end dates were used, at least. If that's the case then we probably don't need to have additional date fields. Otherwise, please feel free to correct me.

If we don't want to maintain a history of the records we could remove the start/end date fields and just have a modified date field. We could then just straight up change the record directly instead of adding a new one. But I don't think it's necessary to have both start/end dates and modified dates.