title: SQL Server date vs smalldatetime
body: <p>I have a bunch of tables which consolidate data on different levels: quarterly, hourly, daily and monthly. Apart from that there's a base table which contains the "raw" data as well, this one contains some extra columns. The consolidated tables all have the same columns.</p>
  
  <p>The base, quarterly and hourly tables make use of a column of type <code>smalldatetime</code> to timestamp the data. This column will also be available in the hourly and daily tables, but of course I won't need the time aspect here.</p>
  
  <p>For the sake of simplicity I want to use the smalldatetime data type here also, but maybe it's better for performance to use a date data type for the column?</p>
  
  <p>Is there a really big difference between the types when it comes down to performance?</p>