The arithabort option determines how Adaptive Server behaves when an arithmetic error occurs. The two arithabort options, arithabort arith_overflow and arithabort numeric_truncation, handle different types of arithmetic errors. You can set each option independently, or set both options with a single set arithabort on or set arithabort off statement.
arithabort arith_overflow specifies behavior following a divide-by-zero error or a loss of precision during either an explicit or an implicit datatype conversion. This type of error is considered serious. The default setting, arithabort arith_overflow on, rolls back the entire transaction in which the error occurs. If the error occurs in a batch that does not contain a transaction, arithabort arith_overflow on does not roll back earlier commands in the batch, but Adaptive Server does not execute any statements that follow the error-generating statement in the batch.
Setting arith_overflow to on refers to the execution time, not to the level of normalization to which Adaptive Server is set.
If you set arithabort arith_overflow off, Adaptive Server aborts the statement that causes the error, but continues to process other statements in the transaction or batch.
arithabort numeric_truncation specifies behavior following a loss of scale by an exact numeric datatype during an implicit datatype conversion. (When an explicit conversion results in a loss of scale, the results are truncated without warning.) The default setting, arithabort numeric_truncation on, aborts the statement that causes the error but continues to process other statements in the transaction or batch. If you set arithabort numeric_truncation off, Adaptive Server truncates the query results and continues processing.
The arithignore option determines whether Adaptive Server prints a warning message after an overflow error. By default, the arithignore option is turned off. This causes Adaptive Server to display a warning message after any query that results in numeric overflow. To ignore overflow errors, use set arithignore on.
