I didn't formulate my question properly, because the query went like "select alldefects /wordcount" where alldefects and wordcount are integers. But none of the different ways of putting the double colon seemed to work. The Postgres notation of this simple procedure is very unintuitive. I haven't been able to remember several times, and most people think of me as a person with a reasonably good memory. There is no obvious place in the documentation to look this up. On 12/4/18, 2:45 PM, "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 1:38 PM Joshua D. Drake <jd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I may be misunderstanding the question but: Indeed... > select cast(x/y as numeric(10,4)); Your answer is 2.0 instead of the correct 2.5 - you need to cast before the division, not after. David J.