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Type conversion can happen in the following cases:
  1. When mixing different data types while combining two result sets with UNION.
  2. When passing to functions and operators, operands of different types than their input operand types.
  3. When assigning values of different types to table row cells.
In these cases, either Regatta implicitly converts them into a data type that allows the operation to continue, or they can be explicitly converted into the desired data type using the general Convert Function or the type-specific conversion functions listed in the table below. The following rules apply to type conversions:
  1. When combining queries (UNION [ALL]), Regatta converts the data types of both queries to the “larger” data type of them. E.g: During UNION on two queries, if the first returns DATE and the other returns TIMESTAMP, Regatta converts the DATE into TIMESTAMP.
  2. When converting strings to other data types, the conversion fails if the string is not a valid representation of the value of the target type. For example, conversion of ‘3’ to Integer would succeed but conversion of ‘ttt’ or ‘3.1’ to integer would fail.
  3. When converting from FLOAT4/8 or DECIMAL to integers, the value is rounded to the closest integer.
  4. During INSERT and UPDATE operations, Regatta converts the value to the datatype of the affected column. If the value is too large for the target data type, the operation fails.
  5. Conversion from TIMESTAMP to DATE or TIME extracts the relevant part of the TIMESTAMP into the target element. E.g: SELECT '2023-12-12 23:00:05'::time returns 23:00:05.
  6. When converting integral types to BOOLEAN, 0 is converted to FALSE and any other value is converted to TRUE.
  7. Any conversion (explicit or implicit) to a numeric type (integers, floating point and decimals) would fail if the value cannot fit within the range of the target type. For example, SELECT 1234567::SMALLINT will fail since the value is out of the SMALLINT range.
  8. Explicit conversion to Character types trims the converted string to fit the size of the target type, however, implicit conversion would not trim the text and would result in an error. For example: CAST(150 as CHAR(2)) returns 15 but assigning 150 to a CHAR(2) column without explicit casting would fail.
  9. CHAR types are implicitly converted to VARCHAR (and the trailing spaces are trimmed) when they are used as inputs to any function/operation. For example: Comparison of VARCHAR(10) containing the value ‘Regatta’ and CHAR(10) containing the value ‘Regatta ’ results in TRUE. Note: If the VARCHAR contains trailing spaces as part of its string, the comparison will return FALSE. For example: CHAR(10) with the text 'Regatta' is not equal to VARCHAR(10) with the text 'Regatta '.