Comparing CAST and CONVERT Performance

Max Vernon runs a performance test of CAST versus CONVERT:

This post is a follow-up to my prior post inspecting the performance of PARSE vs CAST & CONVERT, where we see that PARSE is an order of magnitude slower than CONVERT. In this post, we’ll check if there is a similar difference between using CAST or CONVERT. But just to be clear, CONVERT offers a lot more functionality than CAST; this post will not help you decide which of these functions to use for a specific use-case – I leave that to the reader to decide for themselves.

Max gets slightly different numbers but under the covers they both call the same CONVERT() function. The difference in numbers is noise: both of them have standard deviations of ~200ms, so a t-test can’t distinguish the two. The big choice is whether you’d rather have ANSI standard code (if so, use CAST()) or if you’d prefer additional functionality around dates and times (like CONVERT() offers).