Hah! It worked this time, didn't it? That's how you can force the desired result in PostgreSQL.

There is one problem with this method: What if both numbers are given as columns, like hp / level? We need to use another trick: explicitly converting one column to another data type. This procedure is called casting, and it uses the structure shown below:

SELECT (hp::numeric) / level AS result
FROM character;

The structure column::type changes the column to the specified type. You can do this also by using the CAST() function:

SELECT CAST(hp AS numeric) / level AS result
FROM character;

This function takes the name of the column to convert, the keyword AS, and the new data type.

In PostgreSQL, there are three kinds of number data types:

• Integer data types with names like smallint, integer, bigint, etc.
• Exact number data types (i.e., decimal types) with names like numeric, decimal, money.
• Inexact number data types with names like real, double precision.

When dividing two integers in this course, we always cast the numerator to a numeric data type. In a real world application, you may need a different precision and a different casting (e.g., casting both numbers to real).