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Curious Conversion

  • February 5, 2004 at 5:39 am

    #160419

    All standard dislcaimer apply.  Table design by idiot who left long before I joined the company etc. etc.

    Here's one I came across today.  While trouble shooting an SP that had 'mysteriously' stopped working after an update to it at the start of the week, I noticed that a status column in a table it was updating was a varchar(2). 

    This was curious because it was storing two digit status code 00 to 99

    The updated SP was trying to enter 157, without quotes

    This ended up in the table as a *, so an implicit conversion is going on somewhere.  The question is to what?  * is 42 on my keyboard, so how is it getting to a *?

    Here's a quick snippet to reproduce:

    create table #Test_T

    (Test varchar(2))

    insert into #test_t (test) values('15')  --works OK

    insert into #test_t (test) values(15)  --works OK

    insert into #test_t (test) values('157') --errors

    insert into #test_t (test) values(157) -- Goes in as *

    select * from #test_t

    Thoughts welcome

    Dave Jackson

    http://glossopian.co.uk/
    "I don't know what I don't know."

  • February 5, 2004 at 6:25 am

    #492877

    SQL will convert and truncate data where appropriate. When converting to varchar (implicitly or explicitly) and the value is too large SQL will insert and * instead.

    See 'CAST and CONVERT' in BOL

    Far away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.
    Anon.

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