Why Timestamp cannot be used in place of Date in Java?

One of the tricky question from Java Interview is, "Can we pass a Timestamp instance to a method expecting java.util.Date?", it's a tricky question because the answer is both Yes and No. You can, of course, pass a Timestamp object to a method with the argument as Date because first, Timestamp is a subclass of java.util.Date and second it contains both date and time values which are missing in either java.sql.Date and java.sql.Time. So there is more reason to pass a Timestamp value to Date but you should not be doing that. Why? because Timestamp is not exactly Date. It's a composite type of java.util.Date and an additional nanosecond value which is fitted there to confirm database DATETIME data type, which supports nanosecond precision. If you look at the implementation of java.sql.Timestamp class, you will find that the long value supplied by Date is stored separately then this nanosecond value.

Read more �