Question

I’ve got a report that has been in use quite a while – in fact, the company’s invoice system rests in a large part upon this report (Disclaimer: I didn’t write it). The filtering is based upon whether a field of type VarChar(50) falls between two numeric values passed in by the user.

The problem is that the field the data is being filtered on now not only has simple non-numeric values such as ‘/A’, ‘TEST’ and a slew of other non-numeric data, but also has numeric values that seem to be defying any type of numeric conversion I can think of.

The following (simplified) test query demonstrates the failure:

Declare  @StartSummary Int,
         @EndSummary Int

Select   @StartSummary = 166285,
         @EndSummary = 166289

Select   SummaryInvoice
From     Invoice
Where    IsNull(SummaryInvoice, '') <> ''
And      IsNumeric(SummaryInvoice) = 1
And      Convert(int, SummaryInvoice) Between @StartSummary And @EndSummary

I’ve also attempted conversions using bigint, real and float and all give me similar errors:

Msg 8115, Level 16, State 2, Line 7
Arithmetic overflow error converting
expression to data type int.

I’ve tried other larger numeric datatypes such as BigInt with the same error. I’ve also tried using sub-queries to sidestep the conversion issue by only extracting fields that have numeric data and then converting those in the wrapper query, but then I get other errors which are all variations on a theme indicating that the value stored in the SummaryInvoice field can’t be converted to the relevant data type.

Short of extracting only those records with numeric SummaryInvoice fields to a temporary table and then querying against the temporary table, is there any one-step solution that would solve this problem?

Edit: Here’s the field data that I suspect is causing the problem:

SummaryInvoice

---

11111111111111111111111111

IsNumeric states that this field is numeric – which it is. But attempting to convert it to BigInt causes an arithmetic overflow. Any ideas? It doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident, there seems to have been a number of records populated with data that causes this issue.

Answer 1

It seems that you are gonna have problems with the ISNUMERIC function, since it returns 1 if can be cast to any number type (including ., ,, e0, etc). If you have numbers longer than 2^63-1, you can use DECIMAL or NUMERIC. I’m not sure if you can use PATINDEX to perform an regex look on SummaryInvoice, but if you can, then you should try this:

SELECT SummaryInvoice
FROM Invoice
WHERE ISNULL(SummaryInvoice, '') <> ''
AND CASE WHEN PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',SummaryInvoice) > 0 THEN CONVERT(DECIMAL(30,0), SummaryInvoice) ELSE -1 END
BETWEEN @StartSummary And @EndSummary