Hello,
Divide by zero errors have come up a couple of times on this list (once raised by me). I wonder if I could propose a feature for discussion. Could the result of a division by zero be treated as infinity or null, rather than raising an error? Floating point types already have the concept of infinity.
I'd have thought that there's no reason why a /0 in one row necessarily has to be fatal for the whole view. In many cases, you can imagine that returning infinity makes more sense. Strictly, I suppose, 1/0 should return infinity, 0/0 null and -1/0 negative infinity. Alternatively, all could return NaN. At least there could be a configuration option to turn on this behaviour.
The concern stems from the fact that when a divide by zero occurs in a view, no rows at all are returned, just the error message. This makes it very difficult to work out where the problem value is, compared to other tools like spreadsheets, which return a cell error. A view can be very fragile. Further, the Postgres error doesn't give any details of the field and of course can't point to the row, it just says
ERROR: division by zero
There may well be good reasons for not treating this. I've come across comments such as 'I think everybody would agree that this would be a bad thing to do!' but remain to be convinced.
I know you can use CASE and NULLIF but if you have complex calculations, that makes them a lot less readable.
Regards
Oliver Kohll
