cast('0.5' as numeric) + cast('0.5' as numeric) = 2 ???

Hi folks,
I want to talk about data types. I was of the impression that numeric
was a fixed data type. Why does sql 2005 exhibit the above behaviour
when casting to this datatype from a string?
Cheers,
AlexThe NUMERIC data type has precision and scale. Since you did not specify
scale in your CAST, the default scale of 0 is used. In that case the number
gets rounded to the decimal point and each CAST results in 1 for total of 2.
To CAST correctly you can specify scale 1:
SELECT CAST('0.5' AS NUMERIC(5, 1)) + CAST('0.5' AS NUMERIC(5, 1))
This will correctly return 1.
HTH,
Plamen Ratchev
http://www.SQLStudio.com