Parsename to Extract Precision and Scale values‏ From Decimal Numbers

   
The numeric datatype stores numbers with precision and scale. Suppose you want to extract only a precision or a scale, you can do it via many ways. One of the ways is to make use of the PARSENAME function.

Consider the following example

declare @amount decimal(12,2)
set @amount=87234.50
select parsename(@amount,2) as precision, parsename(@amount,1) as scale

The result is

precision            scale
---------            --------
87234                  50

Parsename is used to extract specified part of a name. In general, it is used to extract names from four part object names separated by a dot. Argument number 1 extracts the last part of a string, and the 2nd argument extracts the next last part.

This way we can effectively make use of parsename function to extract precision and scale values from the decimal numbers.