When working with SQL Server, numeric precision can become a silent troublemaker if you’re not careful. Overflow errors happen when a number exceeds the storage capacity of the column data type. Unlike other errors that are easy to catch in testing, numeric overflow often shows up unexpectedly in production, which can be costly. Understanding how to pick the right precision and scale for your NUMERIC or DECIMAL columns can save you headaches down the road.
number format
Formatting Numbers for International Users in SQL Server (Locale-Aware)
When working with applications that serve people across different countries, you quickly realize that numbers aren’t always written the same way. A salary of 55,000.75 in the U.S. might be displayed as 55.000,75 in Germany or 55 000,75 in France. The decimal and thousands separators change depending on a user’s locale.
If you’re storing numbers in SQL Server but want to display them in a format that makes sense internationally, you’ll want to tap into SQL Server’s locale-aware formatting.
Step by Step Guide to Calculating and Formatting Percentages in SQL Server
When you’re writing reports in SQL Server, one of the first little annoyances you’ll probably bump into is how percentages show up. By default, SQL Server doesn’t have a built-in “percent” data type. Percentages are usually stored as decimals (for example, 0.25 for 25%), and if you just throw those into a report, they won’t look the way people expect.
So you’ll need to do a bit of work to get it nicely formatted into a percentage format that people expect to see.
Also, if you’re calculating percentages from raw values then that will require some more work.
In this article we’ll walk through an example of how to calculate and format percentages in SQL Server.
Cleaning Numeric Strings Before Conversion in SQL Server
Working with messy numeric data is one of those unavoidable realities in database development. Whether you’re importing data from CSV files, web APIs, or legacy systems, you’ll often encounter numeric values stored as strings with all sorts of unwanted characters mixed in. SQL Server’s conversion functions are pretty strict about what they’ll accept, so you need to clean up these strings before attempting any conversions.
Format Different Currencies (such as USD, EUR, AUD) in SQL Server
When working with financial data in SQL Server, you may occasionally need to present numbers as formatted currency values. Storing currency amounts as DECIMAL or MONEY types is common, but these result in raw numbers like 1234.5, which don’t tell users which currency it’s in. With a bit of formatting logic, you can make query results easier to read and more meaningful.
2 Ways to Format Numbers with Thousand Separators and Decimals in SQL Server
When you need to make numbers easier to read in SQL Server, adding thousand separators and controlling decimal places can make all the difference. This is especially true in reports or user-facing queries. Instead of squinting at a long string of digits, formatted output lets values like 1234567.89 appear as 1,234,567.89, making them much quicker to understand.
SQL Server offers a few ways to do this, but two stand out for their simplicity and reliability. The first is with the FORMAT() function, which gives you full control over how numbers look (and even supports different cultures). The second is the CONVERT() approach, which works well for quick, no-frills formatting when using the money data type. Both are easy to use, and I provide examples of each in this article.
Round vs Format in SQL Server: Which to Use for Decimal Precision?
When working with numbers in SQL Server, both ROUND() and FORMAT() can be used to round the numeric values to a given decimal precision. But that doesn’t mean we should use them interchangeably. Each function serves a different purpose and has its distinct use cases.
7 Functions to Format a Number to 2 Decimal Places in MySQL
A common task when working with numbers is to format them to a certain amount of decimal places. Two decimal places seems to be the most common format, but we can format to any number of decimal places we want. MySQL provides us with a number of functions that can help us achieve this.
Below are seven functions that can be used to format a number to two decimal places in MySQL.
Signed vs Unsigned Integers
The integer data type is probably one of the more common data types when working with database management systems (and with computing in general). The integer is a numeric data type that allows us to store certain kinds of numbers.
More specifically, an integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (e.g. 1, 2, 3, …) or a negative integer with a minus sign (e.g. −1, −2, −3, …). Integers contain no decimal or fractional part.
However, many computing environments distinguish between signed integers and unsigned integers.
Let’s take a look at the difference between signed integers and unsigned integers.
How TRY_PARSE() Works in SQL Server
In SQL Server, the TRY_PARSE() function returns the result of an expression, translated to the requested data type, or NULL if the conversion fails.
Basically, it works the same as the PARSE() function, except that it returns NULL instead of an error if the cast fails.
Both functions are intended for converting string values to either date/time or number types.
