This is an excellent question, thank you Greg. It serves as a reminder that "thou shalt not omit the size when declaring a string based variable" as it can serve as a ground of subtle bugs. For example, int and varchar are implicitly convertible and funny things can happen because of it:

create proc dbo.dump_me

(

@input varchar

)

as

begin

select @input result;

end;

go

The proc above has a nasty side effect:

exec dbo.dump_me '123';

produces

result

------

1

However, removing the single quotes:

exec dbo.dump_me 123;

produces

result

------

*

While this behaviour is by design, it might catch someone by surprise. The size is omitted, so '123' becomes 1 when cast to varchar(1), but implementation of int data type allows returning * when the number of characters in the int does not fit.

Oleg