Compound Assignment Operators in SQL Server 2008

Compound assignment operators are newly introduced in SQL Server 2008 and the code certainly looks cleaner and easier to type while using them. I am surprised why weren’t they introduced in earlier SQL Server versions at the first place, however now that they are here, let’s quickly learn how to use them:

Observe the following piece of code

As you can see, we have used a compound assignment operator to simplify the syntax of adding 1 to the existing value of @num and assigning the result to @num. Although this may look as it is not needed, it is extremely useful where you have T-SQL code which does many arithmetic operations on variables.

Here are a couple of other Compound Assignment Operators for your reference:

+=    Add
-=    Subtract
*=    Multiply
/=    Divide
^=    Bitwise XOR
|=    Bitwise OR
%=   Modulo
&=   Bitwise AND

About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal, MCSD, MCAD, MCDBA, MCSE, is the founder of DotNetCurry, DNC Magazine for Developers, SQLServerCurry and DevCurry. He has also authored a couple of books 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls and a new one recently at The Absolutely Awesome jQuery CookBook.

Suprotim has received the prestigous Microsoft MVP award for nine times in a row now. In a professional capacity, he is the CEO of A2Z Knowledge Visuals Pvt Ltd, a digital group that represents premium web sites and digital publications comprising of Professional web, windows, mobile and cloud developers, technical managers, and architects.

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