Question

I can’t find a specific answer to this question online. If I take a tinyint field and cast it like so: ‘(DT_STR,2,1252)some_id’ what happens with the single digit numbers? Does a 7 become ‘7’ or ‘7 ‘?

I found some documentation on the MSDN site that the string is null terminated and truncates, but it didn’t specifically say what happens to an int that is shorter than the cast.

Thanks!

Answer 1

In scenarios like this, I find it’s easier to just test and observe.

OLE DB Source

Simple query that ensures we have the correct data type

SELECT cast(10 AS tinyint) AS src
UNION ALL SELECT cast(2 AS tinyint) AS src

Derived Column

Cast our tinyint to a string and add something at the end to view whether it’s left or right padded.

(DT_STR,2,1252) [src] + "X"
LEN((DT_STR,2,1252)src + "X")

Results

I was actually surprised, I’d have expected it to be right padded but that’s not case.

src   Concated   Length
10    10X        3
2     2X         2