I’m trying to do some crosstabs in SQL Server 2008 R2. That part is alright, however, if I try to get percentages for each cell, I run into a problem.
Here is a distilled use case: A survey where people give their favorite color and their favorite fruit. I’d like to know how many like a given fruit AND a given color:
with survey as ( select 'banana' fav_fruit, 'yellow' fav_color union select 'banana', 'red' union select 'apple', 'yellow' union select 'grape', 'red' union select 'apple', 'blue' union select 'orange', 'purple' union select 'pomegranate', 'green' ) select s.fav_color, sum(case when s.fav_fruit = 'banana' then 1 else 0 end) as banana, sum(case when s.fav_fruit = 'banana' then 1 else 0 end) / sum(1) -- why does division always yield 0? "+", "-", and "*" all behave as expected. * 100 as banana_pct, sum(1) as total from survey s group by s.fav_color;
Results:
fav_color banana banana_pct total ------------------------------------ blue 0 0 1 green 0 0 1 purple 0 0 1 red 1 0 2 yellow 1 0 2
What I was expecting:
fav_color banana banana_pct total ------------------------------------ blue 0 0 1 green 0 0 1 purple 0 0 1 red 1 50 2 yellow 1 50 2
Please help me to get what I was expecting?
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Answer
You are using SQL Server. Here is a much simpler example that replicates the issue:
select 1/2
SQL Server does integer division.
Replace the denominator with something like sum(1.0)
or sum(cast 1 as float)
or sum(1e0)
instead of sum(1)
.
Contrary to my expectation at least, SQL Server stores numbers with decimal points as numeric/decimal type (see here) rather than float
. The fixed number of decimal spaces might affect subsequent operations.