RMG,
I believe that will depend on the DBMS you are interacting with.
Forgive me, but I couldn't find that information in your post.
Or is this a trick question?
As far as I know, with Oracle DBMS you cannot access this information even though Oracle does put time stamps on database table rows, I believe. Hence people usually add time stamp columns to their tables and manually keep track of this information.
I am not sufficiently familar with other DBMS's in order to comment on them.
Good Luck,
Avi.