I'm looking for a simple word for a point in time for the name of a database column. The column is for "datetime" objects and it feels wrong to call the column "date", since that implies that the column only contains dates, and similarly it feels wrong to call the column "time". General programming principles dictate that it's also a bad idea to name a column simply by the value type it contains, so I don't want to name it "datetime".
Is there an English word for a "point in time", independent of whether we're talking about time of day, date of year or millennia? I want the word (X) to fit into the column name "creation_X". If you have another idea of a good naming choice I'd love to hear that too.
Edit: The table column in question should specify when the data was recorded. Think of it as a data point for Google Analytics. A row contains, for instance, site visits for 12:00 to 13:00 on 2013-01-01, so the field "time_span" is set to "hour", and the field for column X should be set to "2013-01-01 12:00:00". I can't figure out what to call the column though.
Best Answer
Timestamp is the word universally used for precisely that, especially in programming context.