Curly braces in T-SQL

Question

I've come across the following t-sql:

SELECT {d'9999-12-31'}

Which returns 9999-12-31 00:00:00.000.

This seems to be converting the type of the string literal to a DATETIME. I can't find any documentation on this syntax and I'm wondering if there are any variations, for example if I have a literal 1 but want to represent this in a BIGINT without using CONVERT()/CAST().

Can anyone provide any further information on this syntax? Thanks.

Solution

These are ODBC escape sequences. See Date, Time, and Timestamp Escape Sequences for more details.

There is also similar syntax for uniqueidentifiers

SELECT {guid '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000'},

as well as procedure calls and some other constructs detailed off that link.

With regard to the rest of your question I'm not aware of any way of having an integer literal treated as a bigint or of any particular resource that lists all the ways of influencing how literals are assigned datatypes by SQL Server. Some ways are below.

;WITH cte(thing) AS
(
SELECT CAST(1 AS SQL_VARIANT) UNION ALL
SELECT $1 UNION ALL
SELECT 1e0 UNION ALL
SELECT 1.0000 UNION ALL
SELECT 2147483648 UNION ALL 
SELECT {ts '2011-09-15 01:23:56.123'}  UNION ALL
SELECT {d '2011-09-15'} UNION ALL
SELECT { t '13:33:41' }  UNION ALL
SELECT {guid '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000'} UNION ALL
SELECT 'Foo' UNION ALL
SELECT N'Foo'
)
SELECT thing, 
       sql_variant_property(thing,'basetype') AS basetype,
       sql_variant_property(thing,'precision') AS precision, 
       sql_variant_property(thing,'scale') AS scale, 
       sql_variant_property(thing,'maxlength') AS maxlength
FROM cte

Returns

thing                          basetype            precision   scale  maxlength
------------------------------ ------------------- ----------- ------ ---------
1                              int                 10          0      4
1.00                           money               19          4      8
1                              float               53          0      8
1.0000                         numeric             5           4      5
2147483648                     numeric             10          0      5
2011-09-15 01:23:56.123        datetime            23          3      8
2011-09-15 00:00:00.000        datetime            23          3      8
2011-09-15 13:33:41.000        datetime            23          3      8
00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000 uniqueidentifier    0           0      16
Foo                            varchar             0           0      3
Foo                            nvarchar            0           0      6

Comments

[Tom Hunter]

Thanks @Martin. Are there any reasons why using this syntax might not be a good idea? Is it less compliant/compatible than 'standard' SQL?

[Martin Smith]

@Tom - No idea on that. A google for "ODBC escape sequences" brings back quite a lot of stuff not SQL Server related so seems fairly standardly implemented but I don't know anything more about it really!