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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<!DOCTYPE concept PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Concept//EN" "concept.dtd">
<concept id="datatypes">
<title>Data Types</title>
<prolog>
<metadata>
<data name="Category" value="Impala"/>
<data name="Category" value="Impala Data Types"/>
<data name="Category" value="SQL"/>
<data name="Category" value="Data Analysts"/>
<data name="Category" value="Developers"/>
<data name="Category" value="SQL"/>
<data name="Category" value="Schemas"/>
</metadata>
</prolog>
<conbody>
<p>Impala supports a set of data types that you can use for table columns,
expression values, and function arguments and return values. </p>
<note> Currently, Impala supports only scalar types, not composite or nested
types. Accessing a table containing any columns with unsupported types
causes an error. </note>
<p outputclass="toc"/>
<p> For the notation to write literals of each of these data types, see
<xref href="impala_literals.xml#literals"/>. </p>
<p> Impala supports a limited set of implicit casts to avoid undesired
results from unexpected casting behavior. </p>
<ul>
<li> Impala does not implicitly cast between string and numeric or Boolean
types. Always use <codeph>CAST()</codeph> for these conversions. </li>
<li> Impala does perform implicit casts among the numeric types, when
going from a smaller or less precise type to a larger or more precise
one. For example, Impala will implicitly convert a
<codeph>SMALLINT</codeph> to a <codeph>BIGINT</codeph> or
<codeph>FLOAT</codeph>, but to convert from <codeph>DOUBLE</codeph> to
<codeph>FLOAT</codeph> or <codeph>INT</codeph> to
<codeph>TINYINT</codeph> requires a call to <codeph>CAST()</codeph> in
the query. </li>
<li> Impala does perform implicit casts from <codeph>STRING</codeph> to
<codeph>TIMESTAMP</codeph>. Impala has a restricted set of literal
formats for the <codeph>TIMESTAMP</codeph> data type and the
<codeph>FROM_UNIXTIME()</codeph> format string; see <xref
href="impala_timestamp.xml#timestamp"/> for details. </li>
</ul>
<p>See the topics under this section for full details on implicit and
explicit casting for each data type, and see <xref
href="impala_conversion_functions.xml#conversion_functions"/> for
details about the <codeph>CAST()</codeph> function.</p>
</conbody>
</concept>