MySQL DATETIME vs TIMESTAMP and the year 2038

Judging from MySQL documentation at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/datetime.html, it sounds best to use DATETIME rather than TIMESTAMP if you want your database to be future proof. After all 2038 is only 18+ years away.

The DATETIME type is used for values that contain both date and time parts. MySQL retrieves and displays DATETIME values in 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS' format. The supported range is '1000-01-01 00:00:00' to '9999-12-31 23:59:59'.

The TIMESTAMP data type is used for values that contain both date and time parts. TIMESTAMP has a range of '1970-01-01 00:00:01' UTC to '2038-01-19 03:14:07' UTC.

Btw, another issue that sounds problematic, at least conceptually, is that one can use the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP to initialize auto-updated columns with the current datetime (aka NOW()), but since the TIMESTAMP type is supposed to be up to 2038, wonder why the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP would be a difference (aka return a value that would overflow TIMESTAMP columns, but still work fine – aka return the accurate datetime – for DATETIME columns after the year 2038).

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/timestamp-initialization.html

At the very least, I’d avoid mixing those data types in the same database, for consistency reasons.