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up vote 0 down vote favorite

I am trying to do the following calculation:

DECLARE @X Decimal(18,6);
DECLARE @Y Decimal(20,16);

SET @X = 0.002700;
SET @Y = 0.0027770000000000;

SELECT 200 * ( POWER(@Y, ( -1 / ( 2 * @X ))) - 1 );

However this results in:

Msg 8115, Level 16, State 2, Line 7
Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type float.

I have tried casting to float but to no avail.

Any ideas what I am missing here?

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

A float data type can store a maximum value of about 1.79E+308, but the result of this expression is approximately 5.16E+475. See http://tinyurl.com/oy7deu8

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up vote 1 down vote

May be there is a way to do this. You are trying to calculate @y power (-1/2*@x). This is equivalent to calculating e power (log(y)*(-1/2x)).

You could calculate it as 

select 200 * POWER(2.718281828, log(@Y) * (-1/(2*@X)))

Note that LOG by default calculates the natural logarithm of the number. And e = 2.718281828

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That didn't work either. I found that the value for @y was wrong. However the limitation of the tSQL POWER() function still stands. – Kamran Farzami Jul 24 '15 at 18:20

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