How to Do Type Casting in Snowflake

By default, Snowflake is not strict with type casting. For example, adding a numeric value in string quotes to another numeric value with not give the usual errors other databases and programming languages will give:

select 10 + '10';

However, should the need arise, you can use the cast() function to force the type of a value.

-- cast float to integer
select cast(1.0123456789 as int);

-- cast string to date
select cast('2020-04-22' as date);

-- cast string to decimal
select cast('12.345' as decimal(5,2));

-- cast string to time
select cast('12:45' as time);

You can cast to many Snowflake types such as binary, char, varchar, date, datetime, time, decimal, bigint, and float.