Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

Compound Assignment Operators

Another new feature that streamlines and improves the efficiency of your T-SQL code is compound operators. This is a concept that has been around in many other programming languages for a long time, but has now finally found its way into T-SQL. Compound operators are used when you want to apply an arithmetic operation on a variable and assign the value back into the variable.

For example, the += operator adds the specified value to the variable and then assigns the new value back into the variable. For example,

SET @ctr += 1

is functionally the same as

SET @ctr = @ctr + 1

The compound operators are a quicker to type, and they offer a cleaner piece of finished code. Following is the complete list of compound operators ...