Question

I have a table with a varchar column, and I want to find values that match a certain number. So lets say that column contains the following entries (except with millions of rows in real life):

123456789012
2345678
3456
23 45
713?2
00123456789012

So I decide I want all the rows which are numerically 123456789012 write a statement that looks something like this:

SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE CAST(MyColumn as bigint) = 123456789012

It should return the first and last row, but instead the whole query blows up because it can’t convert the “23 45” and “713?2” to bigint.

Is there another way to do the conversion that will return NULL for values that can’t convert?

Answer 1

SQL Server does NOT guarantee boolean operator short-circuit, see On SQL Server boolean operator short-circuit. So all solution using ISNUMERIC(...) AND CAST(...) are fundamentally flawed (they may work, but hey can arbitrarily fail later dependiong on the generated plan). A better solution is using CASE, as Thomas suggests: CASE ISNUMERIC(...) WHEN 1 THEN CAST(...) ELSE NULL END. But, as gbn pointed out, ISNUMERIC is notoriously finicky in identifying what ‘numeric’ means and many cases where one would expect it to return 0 it returns 1. So mixing the CASE with the LIKE:

CASE WHEN MyRow NOT LIKE '%[^0-9]%' THEN CAST(MyRow as bigint) ELSE NULL END

But the real problem is that if you have millions of rows and you have to search them like this, you’ll always end up scanning end-to-end since the expression is not SARG-able (no matter how we rewrite it). The real issue here is data purity, and should be addressed at the appropriate level, where the data is populated. Another thing to consider is if is possible to create a persisted computed column with this expression and create a filtered index on it which eliminates NULL (ie. non-numeric). That would speed up things a little.