You can convert character data to a noncharacter type—such as a money, date/time, exact numeric, or approximate numeric type—if it consists entirely of characters that are valid for the new type. Leading blanks are ignored. However, if a char expression that consists of a blank or blanks is converted to a datetime expression, Adaptive Server converts the blanks into the default datetime value of “Jan 1, 1900.”
Syntax errors are generated when the data includes unacceptable characters. Following are some examples of characters that cause syntax errors:
Commas or decimal points in integer data
Commas in monetary data
Letters in exact or approximate numeric data or bit stream data
Misspelled month names in date and time data
Implicit conversions between unichar/univarchar and datetime/smalldatetime are supported.