Christopher Stobbs (8/24/2009)
I agree with the last two posts. I got it wrong cause I can't mind read.I can think of many examples where the cast is not implicit...
Well, I disagree with those two posts and with you. Is the conversion from tinyint to int implicit, explicit, or forbidden? It's implicit. But as far as I can see you are telling me that because it is perfectly valid to write
declare @integer int
declare @octet tinyint
select @octet = 0
select @integer = cast (@octet as int)
the conversion from tinyint to int is explicit. Well, I think that's a very strange point of view.
The descriptions in BOL seem to me quite clear. In fact there's even a nice matrix showing which conversions are implicit, which explicit, and which forbidden. It's been there since SQL 2000. It's still there in SQL 2008 R2.
Tom