Showing posts with label Operators. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Operators. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Does Anyone Use ~ (Bitwise NOT)?

I have Used ¦ (Bitwise OR) and & (Bitwise AND) but I have never used ~ (Bitwise NOT)
Lets' see what it does

SELECT ~170
this returns -171, OK Fair enough.

SELECT ~convert(tinyint,170)
this returns 85, mmmmmmm

Here is some more interesting stuff

DECLARE @i int, @i2 tinyint,@i3 smallint, @i4 bigint
SELECT @i =170,@i2 = 170,@i3 =170,@i4 = 170

SELECT ~@i int, ~@i2 tinyint,~@i3 smallint, ~@i4 bigint

output
-171 85 -171 -171

So for the tinyint it is 85, for the other datatypes it is -171

What does BOL say?

Remarks
The bitwise ~ operator performs a bitwise logical NOT for the expression, taking each corresponding bit. The bits in the result are set to 1 if one bit (for the current bit being resolved) in expression has a value of 0; otherwise, the bit in the result is cleared to a value of 1.

The ~ bitwise operator can be used only on columns of the integer data type category.



Important
When performing any kind of bitwise operation, the storage length of the expression used in the bitwise operation is important. It is recommended that you use the same number of bytes when storing values. For example, storing the decimal value of 5 as a tinyint, smallint, or int produces a value stored with different numbers of bytes. tinyint stores data using 1 byte, smallint stores data using 2 bytes, and int stores data using 4 bytes. Therefore, performing a bitwise operation on an int decimal value can produce different results as compared to a direct binary or hexidecimal translation, especially when the ~ (bitwise NOT) operator is used. The bitwise NOT operation may occur on a variable of a shorter length that, when converted to a longer data type variable, may not have the bits in the upper 8 bits set to the expected value. It is recommended that you convert the smaller data type variable to the larger data type, and then perform the NOT operation on the result.

There you have it.