How to avoid the "divide by zero" error in SQL?

In order to avoid a "Division by zero" error we have programmed it like this:

Select Case when divisor=0 then null
Else dividend / divisor
End ,,,

But here is a much nicer way of doing it:

Select dividend / NULLIF(divisor, 0) ...

Now the only problem is to remember the NullIf bit, if I use the "/" key.

In case you want to return zero, in case a zero devision would happen, you can use:

SELECT COALESCE(dividend / NULLIF(divisor,0), 0) FROM sometable

For every divisor that is zero, you will get a zero in the result set.

This seemed to be the best fix for my situation when trying to address dividing by zero, which does happen in my data.

Suppose you want to calculate the male–female ratios for various school clubs, but you discover that the following query fails and issues a divide-by-zero error when it tries to calculate ratio for the Lord of the Rings Club, which has no women:

SELECT club_id, males, females, males/females AS ratio
  FROM school_clubs;

You can use the function NULLIF to avoid division by zero. NULLIF compares two expressions and returns null if they are equal or the first expression otherwise.

Rewrite the query as:

SELECT club_id, males, females, males/NULLIF(females, 0) AS ratio
  FROM school_clubs;

Any number divided by NULL gives NULL, and no error is generated.

You can also do this at the beginning of the query:

SET ARITHABORT OFF 
SET ANSI_WARNINGS OFF

So if you have something like 100/0 it will return NULL. I've only done this for simple queries, so I don't know how it will affect longer/complex ones.

You can at least stop the query from breaking with an error and return NULL if there is a division by zero:

SELECT a / NULLIF(b, 0) FROM t 

However, I would NEVER convert this to Zero with coalesce like it is shown in that other answer which got many upvotes. This is completely wrong in a mathematical sense, and it is even dangerous as your application will likely return wrong and misleading results.

SELECT Dividend / ISNULL(NULLIF(Divisor,0), 1) AS Result from table

By catching the zero with a nullif(), then the resulting null with an isnull() you can circumvent your divide by zero error.

EDIT: I'm getting a lot of downvotes on this recently...so I thought I'd just add a note that this answer was written before the question underwent it's most recent edit, where returning null was highlighted as an option...which seems very acceptable. Some of my answer was addressed to concerns like that of Edwardo, in the comments, who seemed to be advocating returning a 0. This is the case I was railing against.

ANSWER: I think there's an underlying issue here, which is that division by 0 is not legal. It's an indication that something is fundementally wrong. If you're dividing by zero, you're trying to do something that doesn't make sense mathematically, so no numeric answer you can get will be valid. (Use of null in this case is reasonable, as it is not a value that will be used in later mathematical calculations).

So Edwardo asks in the comments "what if the user puts in a 0?", and he advocates that it should be okay to get a 0 in return. If the user puts zero in the amount, and you want 0 returned when they do that, then you should put in code at the business rules level to catch that value and return 0...not have some special case where division by 0 = 0.

That's a subtle difference, but it's important...because the next time someone calls your function and expects it to do the right thing, and it does something funky that isn't mathematically correct, but just handles the particular edge case it's got a good chance of biting someone later. You're not really dividing by 0...you're just returning an bad answer to a bad question.

Imagine I'm coding something, and I screw it up. I should be reading in a radiation measurement scaling value, but in a strange edge case I didn't anticipate, I read in 0. I then drop my value into your function...you return me a 0! Hurray, no radiation! Except it's really there and it's just that I was passing in a bad value...but I have no idea. I want division to throw the error because it's the flag that something is wrong.

Replacing "divide by zero" with zero is controversial - but it's also not the only option. In some cases replacing with 1 is (reasonably) appropriate. I often find myself using

 ISNULL(Numerator/NULLIF(Divisor,0),1)

when I'm looking at shifts in scores/counts, and want to default to 1 if I don't have data. For example

NewScore = OldScore *  ISNULL(NewSampleScore/NULLIF(OldSampleScore,0),1) 

More often than not, I've actually calculated this ratio somewhere else (not least because it can throw some very large adjustment factors for low denominators. In this case I'd normally control for OldSampleScore is greater than a threshold; which then precludes zero. But sometimes the 'hack' is appropriate.

I wrote a function a while back to handle it for my stored procedures:

print 'Creating safeDivide Stored Proc ...'
go

if exists (select * from dbo.sysobjects where  name = 'safeDivide') drop function safeDivide;
go

create function dbo.safeDivide( @Numerator decimal(38,19), @divisor decimal(39,19))
   returns decimal(38,19)
begin
 -- **************************************************************************
 --  Procedure: safeDivide()
 --     Author: Ron Savage, Central, ex: 1282
 --       Date: 06/22/2004
 --
 --  Description:
 --  This function divides the first argument by the second argument after
 --  checking for NULL or 0 divisors to avoid "divide by zero" errors.
 -- Change History:
 --
 -- Date        Init. Description
 -- 05/14/2009  RS    Updated to handle really freaking big numbers, just in
 --                   case. :-)
 -- 05/14/2009  RS    Updated to handle negative divisors.
 -- **************************************************************************
   declare @p_product    decimal(38,19);

   select @p_product = null;

   if ( @divisor is not null and @divisor <> 0 and @Numerator is not null )
      select @p_product = @Numerator / @divisor;

   return(@p_product)
end
go

Add a CHECK constraint that forces Divisor to be non-zero Add a validator to the form so that the user cannot enter zero values into this field.

For update SQLs:

update Table1 set Col1 = Col2 / ISNULL(NULLIF(Col3,0),1)

There is no magic global setting 'turn division by 0 exceptions off'. The operation has to to throw, since the mathematical meaning of x/0 is different from the NULL meaning, so it cannot return NULL. I assume you are taking care of the obvious and your queries have conditions that should eliminate the records with the 0 divisor and never evaluate the division. The usual 'gotcha' is than most developers expect SQL to behave like procedural languages and offer logical operator short-circuit, but it does NOT. I recommend you read this article: http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/ArticleID/9148/pg/2/2.html

Here is a situation where you can divide by zero. The business rule is that to calculate inventory turns, you take cost of goods sold for a period, annualize it. After you have the annualized number, you divide by the average inventory for the period.

I'm looking at calculating the number of inventory turns that occur in a three month period. I have calculated that I have Cost of Goods sold during the three month period of $1,000. The annual rate of sales is $4,000 ($1,000/3)*12. The beginning inventory is 0. The ending inventory is 0. My average inventory is now 0. I have sales of $4000 per year, and no inventory. This yields an infinite number of turns. This means that all my inventory is being converted and purchased by customers.

This is a business rule of how to calculate inventory turns.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.Divide(@Numerator Real, @Denominator Real)
RETURNS Real AS
/*
Purpose:      Handle Division by Zero errors
Description:  User Defined Scalar Function
Parameter(s): @Numerator and @Denominator

Test it:

SELECT 'Numerator = 0' Division, dbo.fn_CORP_Divide(0,16) Results
UNION ALL
SELECT 'Denominator = 0', dbo.fn_CORP_Divide(16,0)
UNION ALL
SELECT 'Numerator is NULL', dbo.fn_CORP_Divide(NULL,16)
UNION ALL
SELECT 'Denominator is NULL', dbo.fn_CORP_Divide(16,NULL)
UNION ALL
SELECT 'Numerator & Denominator is NULL', dbo.fn_CORP_Divide(NULL,NULL)
UNION ALL
SELECT 'Numerator & Denominator = 0', dbo.fn_CORP_Divide(0,0)
UNION ALL
SELECT '16 / 4', dbo.fn_CORP_Divide(16,4)
UNION ALL
SELECT '16 / 3', dbo.fn_CORP_Divide(16,3)

*/
BEGIN
    RETURN
        CASE WHEN @Denominator = 0 THEN
            NULL
        ELSE
            @Numerator / @Denominator
        END
END
GO

Filter out data in using a where clause so that you don't get 0 values.

Sometimes, 0 might not be appropriate, but sometimes 1 is also not appropriate. Sometimes a jump from 0 to 100,000,000 described as 1 or 100-percent change might also be misleading. 100,000,000 percent might be appropriate in that scenario. It depends on what kind of conclusions you intend to draw based on the percentages or ratios.

For example, a very small-selling item moving from 2-4 sold and a very large-selling item changing from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 sold might mean very different things to an analyst or to management, but would both come through as 100% or 1 change.

It might be easier to isolate NULL values than to scour over a bunch of 0% or 100% rows mixed with legitimate data. Often, a 0 in the denominator can indicate an error or missing value, and you might not want to just fill in an arbitrary value just to make your dataset look tidy.

CASE
     WHEN [Denominator] = 0
     THEN NULL --or any value or sub case
     ELSE [Numerator]/[Denominator]
END as DivisionProblem

This is how I fixed it:

IIF(ValueA != 0, Total / ValueA, 0)

It can be wrapped in an update:

SET Pct = IIF(ValueA != 0, Total / ValueA, 0)

Or in a select:

SELECT IIF(ValueA != 0, Total / ValueA, 0) AS Pct FROM Tablename;

Thoughts?

You can handle the error appropriately when it propagates back to the calling program (or ignore it if that's what you want). In C# any errors that occur in SQL will throw an exception that I can catch and then handle in my code, just like any other error.

I agree with Beska in that you do not want to hide the error. You may not be dealing with a nuclear reactor but hiding errors in general is bad programming practice. This is one of the reasons most modern programming languages implement structured exception handling to decouple the actual return value with an error / status code. This is especially true when you are doing math. The biggest problem is that you cannot distinguish between a correctly computed 0 being returned or a 0 as the result of an error. Instead any value returned is the computed value and if anything goes wrong an exception is thrown. This will of course differ depending on how you are accessing the database and what language you are using but you should always be able to get an error message that you can deal with.

try
{
    Database.ComputePercentage();
}
catch (SqlException e)
{
    // now you can handle the exception or at least log that the exception was thrown if you choose not to handle it
    // Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Divide by zero error encountered.
}

Use NULLIF(exp,0) but in this way - NULLIF(ISNULL(exp,0),0)

NULLIF(exp,0) breaks if exp is null but NULLIF(ISNULL(exp,0),0) will not break