Dave Mason investigates the valid data types you can use as inputs for WAITFOR:
There are certain design patterns in T-SQL that give me pause. They may not be “code smells” per se, but when I encounter them I find myself thinking “there’s got to be a more sensible way to accomplish this”. WAITFOR DELAY is one example. I’ve used it a few times here and there, mostly in one-off scripts. If I wrote some code that used it regularly in production, I’d be paranoid about putting my SPID to sleep forever. Maybe a little bit of paranoia is a good thing. But I digress.
A recent task found its way to me, and I’ve decided to use WAITFOR DELAY as part of my solution. (It hasn’t been tested or implemented yet–perhaps more on this in another post.) My usage this time has been more complex than in the past. What I already knew is that you can use a string literal for the time_to_pass argument. For example, this will delay for 3½ seconds:
WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:03.500'
Click through for a bunch of testing.