I have a math question and a benchmark question and I'm not sure how to benchmark it.

What I'm trying to do is use pgsql as a bayes token store for a spam filter I'm writing. In doing this I have a data structure with index keys and two integer fields 'h_msgs' and 's_msgs' for each token and another pair for each user (H_msgs, S_msgs), making four data pieces for each user-token relationship.

for Bayes these are run through an equation of the form:
(s_msgs/S_msgs)/(s_msgs/S_msgs + h_msgs/H_msgs)
Which I currently do in perl.
In pgsql I have to modify this a bit with 'cast (s_msgs as double precision)' or 'cast(s_msgs as real)' in order to get floating point math.
( cast(s_msgs as double precision)/S_msgs)  and so on...

Question: Is there a better way to get floating point math out of a set of integers?

Thought occurred to me that if I let pgsql do this, it should be considerably faster since perl is slower than C. But I don't know if I have any good way of proving this. The data retrieval process tends to dwarf everything else -- which may mean I really shouldn't waste my time with this anyways.

But I was wondering if the thinking is valid, and how I might benchmark the differences.

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