I came across integer division in Python 2.x. If you divide one integer by another you get an integer result. So 5/2 = 2 instead of 2.5. You get floor division, not true division (Python – Changing the Division Operator). In Python 3, true division is the default (thank goodness) but in Python 2.x you need to make one of the numbers a float to get a float returned. So 5.0/2 = 2.5. I was bitten by this early on and know the standard way of handling it.
What I didn’t know was that integer division was the norm in SQL database SELECT statements. I had mainly been using MySQL and MySQL was pretty unique as it turned out:
MySQL by default does floating point division, even if both operators are of type INTEGER, so the above [1/2] would return 0.5 in MySQL. All of the other database engines tested do integer division, and return an integer result. (SQLite – Differences Between Engines).
Anyway, in SOFA Statistics, row and column percentages were affected by this behaviour and always returned x.0 %. There was never anything other than zero after the decimal point. The fix was very simple. Instead of SELECT … 100*(num/denom) the relevant code is SELECT … 100.0*(num/denom). The 100 is now a float for those who missed that small but significant difference.