Why cast/convert from int returns an asterisk

Question

Someone recently asked me this question and I thought I\'d post it on Stack Overflow to get some input.

Now obviously both of the following scenarios are supposed to

Answer 1

You can read on the CAST and CONVERT page on the "Truncating and Rounding Results" section. Int, smallint and tinyint will return * when the result length is too short to display when converted to char or varchar. Other numeric to string conversions will return an error.