Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Optimistic Locking Using the rowversion Data Type

SQL Server 2012 provides a special data type called rowversion that can be used for optimistic locking purposes within applications. The purpose of the rowversion data type is to serve as a version number in optimistic locking schemes. SQL Server automatically generates the value for a rowversion column whenever a row that contains a column of this type is inserted or updated. The rowversion data type is an 8-byte binary data type, and other than guaranteeing that the value is unique and monotonically increasing, the value is not meaningful; you cannot look at the individual bytes and make any sense of them.

Note

In previous versions of SQL Server, the rowversion data type was also referred to ...