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 ...

Based on Sam Holder’s answer at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7388475/reading-int-values-from-sqldatareader/54296026, just contributed an extension method for fetching Int32 values via ADO.net’s SqlDataReader, without jumping through hoops (aka first fetch column ordinal [number] by name, then fetching the int value passing the column ...