"David Portas" wrote:

> marcmc wrote:
> > select 717306 * 3000
> > Server: Msg 8115, Level 16, State 2, Line 1
> > Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type int.
> >
> > What's the story with this?
>
> You didn't specify a datatype for the numbers so SQL Server has to
> guess. The numbers don't have any decimals so the server guesses
> INTEGER but that gives an overflow because the result is larger than
> the maximum allowed for an integer (2147483647).
>
> The solution is either to use decimal notation so that the server will
> implicitly convert to a decimal:
>
> SELECT 717306 * 3000.0 ;
>
> or a much better solution is to specify the types explicity:
>
> SELECT CAST(717306 AS NUMERIC(10,0)) * CAST(3000 AS NUMERIC(10,0)) ;
>
> Implicit type conversion is a source of many errors so it pays to avoid
> it where you can by always specfiying the types. Of course this isn't a
> very typical example because both values are literals. More usually, at
> least one would be an expression based on a column or variable, which
> therefore is based on an explicit datatype of its own.
>
> --
> David Portas
> SQL Server MVP
> --
>
>