How to Round Up a Number to the Nearest Integer in SQL

Problem:

You want to round up a number to the nearest integer in SQL.

Example:

Our database has a table named rent with data in the following columns: id, city, area, and bikes_for_rent.

Let’s show each city’s name along with the ratio of its area to the number of bikes for rent. This ratio should be an integer.

Solution:

SELECT 
  city, 
  CEILING(area/bikes_for_rent) AS ratio
FROM rent;

The query returns each city with the ratio as an integer of rounded up the area per one bike.

Discussion:

Like its counterpart floor, ceiling is a mathematical operation that takes a number and rounds it up to the nearest integer. For example, the ceiling of 5 is 5, and so is the ceiling of 4.1.

SQL uses the CEILING function to perform this computation. It takes a single argument: the column whose values you’d like to round up to the nearest integer.

In our example, we’d like to calculate how many square meters (rounded up to the nearest integer) there are per one bike. In our example, we used CEILING like so: CEILING(area/bikes_for_rent)). This returns an integer result, not a float.