4 Ways to Increase Your Salary (Using UPDATE)

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4 Ways to Increase Your Salary (Using UPDATE)

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azaroth_lettar

Posted Thursday, November 26, 2009 4:21 PM

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Last Login: Thursday, September 23, 2010 7:22 AM
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Please note that id as identity, so using

count (*)

do not deliver the last record but much better to use

max (id)

.
Besides the set should be:

set salary = salary * 1.15

dividing machines are bad.

Post #825382

fzaynoun

Posted Thursday, November 26, 2009 5:34 PM

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This article will improve your skills by reading it, then going into the discussion section and learning how the solution provided is wrong, why not use it, and what to use instead.

Post #825389

jarred.nicholls

Posted Thursday, November 26, 2009 6:04 PM

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fzaynoun (11/26/2009)

This article will improve your skills by reading it, then going into the discussion section and learning how the solution provided is wrong, why not use it, and what to use instead.

rofl

Post #825393

dalcock

Posted Friday, November 27, 2009 8:45 AM

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I'm sure I will receive much abuse for this post, but I'm going to share my thoughts anyway because I am a big fan of SQLServer Central and I care about the quality, accuracy and relevancy of the content on this site.

That being said, I found this article extremely disappointing on many levels. First off, as has been mentioned already, the operator precedence applied, as well as the corresponding result, are identical for the expressions (X * Y) / Z and X*Y/Z.

Second, as the author mentions, SQL is built upon set theory and the performance of set based operations dramaticaly outperforms sequential operations, which is why I can't understand why the artical is demonstrating alternatives to set-based solutions when a real-world premise for doing so hasn't even been provided.

Last, there are several set-based operations that can accomplish sophisticated updates (like using ROWCOUNT) that numerous prior articles on this very site have identified. So, as I said, I am very disappointed with this article and fail to see how it is relevant (or helpful) at all to SQL programmers new and old.

Am I missing something here?

Post #825643

David Walker-278941

Posted Monday, November 30, 2009 10:00 AM

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"Don't use salary * 115 / 100. This violates the operator precedence rule and gives the wrong result."

That statement is absolutely wrong. The Microsoft page that the article links to says "When two operators in an expression have the same operator precedence level, they are evaluated left to right based on their position in the expression."

Since, as has been mentioned in the comments, multiply and divide have the same precedence, the expression

salary * 115 / 100

is exactly and precisely the same as

(salary * 115)/ 100

Yes, dividing 115 / 100 returns 1, but that doesn't happen here if parentheses are not used. Salary is multiplied by 115 before the result of that is divided by 100. Left to right. (I prefer Salary * 1.15, which someone mentioned above.)

It would be nice to see the original article get corrected by the author!

David Walker

Post #826333

Colin Heming

Posted Tuesday, December 01, 2009 6:48 PM

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Operator precedence isn't just a programming or SQL server concept - it's a basic rule of mathematics. And no, multiplication doesn't occur before division or vice versa. The left-most operation is evaluated first. This is even clearly conveyed in the linked microsoft article.

The reason you may get differences where division is used is not due to operator precedence - it's due to SQL server interpreting the numerator and denominator as integers and therefore defining the result to be an integer, truncating the fractional portion.

The simpliest way to avoid this is to explicitly make either the numerator or denominator a decimal term, ie use / 100.0 instead of just / 100 or explicitly cast either as a decimal type. The result will then also be a decimal type. (Casting the result after the calculation has no effect.)

However, in this particular case, the numerator would already be a decimal type by the time the division occurs - salary is a float so salary * 115 produces a decimal type. So this whole concept doesn't even apply to this example. Furthermore, the reason for not simply using salary * 1.15 eludes me.

It may seem silly to harp on about a minor technicality, but getting such a basic concept wrong invalidates the credibility of the rest of the article. I'd advise a bit more fact checking and testing for next time.

Post #827152

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