Division by zero.

From: Warren Vanichuk <pyber(at)street-light(dot)com>
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Division by zero.
Date: 2000-11-28 01:01:06
Message-ID: Pine.LNX.4.21.0011271653040.6363-100000@urd.street-light.com
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Greetings.

I am wanting to order a query by a resulting ratio that's determined by the
division of two columns. 99.99% of the time, the columns will only numbers
greater than 0, but occasionally the columns will be 0, resulting in a
divide by zero error.

The behaviour I was expecting (from working with other databases) was that
if a divide by zero occured, the column would merely be NULL in the returned
set of data. Under PostgreSQL it appears to actually abort the transaction,
and return no data.

freehost=> create table foo( bar int4, baz int4 );
CREATE
freehost=> insert into foo values ( 1, 0 );
INSERT 38390 1
freehost=> insert into foo values ( 0 , 1 );
INSERT 38391 1
freehost=> insert into foo values ( 1, 1 );
INSERT 38392 1
freehost=> select ( bar / baz ) as redpill from foo;
ERROR: floating point exception! The last floating point operation either exceeded legal ranges or was a divide by zero

is the current results. What are the possibilities of this behaviour being
changed in future revisions so that the results returned would be :

redpill
-------
NULL
0
1

?

Is there a workaround for this that I'm not seeing?

Any help would be appriecated.. :)

Sincerely, Warren

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