Anatoly Lubarsky

I had a nasty bug today in SQL with INT overflow:

SELECT SUM(COL)
  FROM MyTable

When the sum gets bigger than 2,147,483,647 in sql runtime it overflows.

"Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type int."

The bad thing is that I knew it. The SUM was also inside more complicated expression with assign to BIGINT parameter :(

BTW, SUM in T-SQL returns only INT, DECIMAL, MONEY, FLOAT according to BOL. So the fix should be like so:

SELECT SUM(CAST(COL AS DECIMAL))
  FROM MyTable

Which looks wierd at a 1st glance, but is correct. Another point: SUM can also return BIGINT in MSSQL 2005 like so:

SELECT SUM(CAST(COL AS BIGINT))
  FROM MyTable

But it is not documented...

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