Division By Zero

[monetdb-team]

Date: 2015-06-22 02:24:20 +0200
From: Raffy <>
To: SQL devs <>
Version: 11.19.11 (Oct2014-SP3)
CC: @njnes

Last updated: 2017-12-20 22:15:31 +0100

Comment 20935

Date: 2015-06-22 02:24:20 +0200
From: Raffy <>

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build Identifier:

This throws a division by zero:

SELECT
count(*) / ((max("end")-min(start)) / 60)
FROM t
GROUP BY s
HAVING max("end")-min(start)<>0 ;

While this does not:

SELECT
count(*) / ((max("end")-min(start)))
FROM t
GROUP BY s
HAVING max("end")-min(start)<>0;

Recreate with:

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

create table t ("end" timestamp, start timestamp, s text);
insert into t ("2015-03-01 00:00:00.135000", "2015-03-01 00:18:00.258000", "foo");
insert into t ("2015-03-01 00:04:00.135000", "2015-03-01 00:22:00.258000", "bar");
SELECT
count(*) / ((max("end")-min(start)) / 60)
FROM t
GROUP BY s
HAVING max("end")-min(start)<>0 ;

Actual Results:

Division by zero (which it shouldn't!)

Comment 20941

Date: 2015-06-22 21:44:01 +0200
From: @njnes

fixed in jul2015 branch

Comment 21224

Date: 2015-08-28 13:42:57 +0200
From: @sjoerdmullender

Jul2015 has been released.

Comment 26037

Date: 2017-12-20 22:15:31 +0100
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset 0276d6b12a9b made by Martin Kersten mk@cwi.nl in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see https//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=0276d6b12a9b

Changeset description:

Avoid append instructions to disappear
Calling this optimizer after a multiplex expansion
could lead to removal of append() instructions.
The test showing it div_zero.Bug-3742.