Everybody that has had to do some numeric calculations in SQL will have encountered this simple problem: divide an integer by another integer and round down the outcome to the nearest integer. In many cases people write it like this:

FLOOR(a/b)

Simple enough, right? First we do the division a/b, then we round down using the function FLOOR().


Update: My claim that TRUNCATE(a/b, 0) is equivalent to FLOOR(a/b) is false! It maybe true when the outcome of the division is a positive number, but in case of a negative number, TRUNCATE() will only lose the decimals (resulting in a higher negative number) and FLOOR() will still round down.

Thanks …