SQL Server Scientific Notation

Posted by John Liu on Sunday, September 7, 2025

When we import numeric data into SQL server, sometime the source data might be in scientific notation format. SQL Server can’t automatically convert scientific notation value string to decimal or integer value and will result with implecite conversion error.

To properly import the data, we need to convert the source string value to FLOAT or REAL data type first before convert to the target data type.

SELECT CONVERT(DECIMAL(18,3),CONVERT(FLOAT,'1.2E-5'))