UMG Developer (8/3/2010)

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So it would be perfectly reasonable for a single COALESCE statement to return 5 or more different types depending on the inputs. (Well maybe not reasonable, but certainly possible.)

DECLARE @STR int
SET @STR=NULL
SELECT COALESCE(@STR,'GIVEN STRING IS NULL',CAST(1 AS DATETIME))

Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string.

Bradley Deem (8/4/2010)[hrActually, with Coalesce it comes down to the expression with the highest data type precedence being returned, thus exactly 1 predictable type will be returned. Consider the following which results in an error.