Best way to store time (hh:mm) in a database

Question

I want to store times in a database table but only need to store the hours and minutes. I know I could just use DATETIME and ignore the other components of the date, but wha

Answer 1

Instead of minutes-past-midnight we store it as 24 hours clock, as an SMALLINT.

09:12 = 912 14:15 = 1415

when converting back to "human readable form" we just insert a colon ":" two characters from the right. Left-pad with zeros if you need to. Saves the mathematics each way, and uses a few fewer bytes (compared to varchar), plus enforces that the value is numeric (rather than alphanumeric)

Pretty goofy though ... there should have been a TIME datatype in MS SQL for many a year already IMHO ...