SQL CEIL

Rounds UP to the nearest whole number, no matter how small the decimal remainder — 4583.01 becomes 4584.

What & Why

CEIL(n) (short for "ceiling") always rounds up to the next whole number, unless the input is already a whole number. Common use: computing "how many full batches are needed" — 10 items at 3 per batch needs 4 batches, not 3.33.

See How It Works

BUSINESS QUESTION

Marketing wants the minimum whole-thousand budget bucket that can contain each campaign spend.

id	name	channel	spend	start_date	end_date	status	target_segment
1	Spring Launch	google_ads	55000.00	2024-01-15	2024-03-31	active	smb
2	Retention Webinar	email	45000.00	2024-02-10	2024-04-15	active	enterprise
3	Finance Retargeting	linkedin	50000.00	2024-03-12	2024-05-31	active	enterprise
4	Enterprise Search	google_ads	60000.00	2024-04-01	2024-06-30	active	enterprise

EXAMPLE QUERY

SELECT
  id AS campaign_id,
  spend,
  CEIL(spend / 1000.0) AS thousand_bucket
FROM marketing.campaigns
ORDER BY campaign_id;

RESULT — exact output from the displayed Queryflo rows

campaign_id	spend	thousand_bucket
1	55000.00	55
2	45000.00	45
3	50000.00	50
4	60000.00	60

Every displayed spend is already an exact multiple of one thousand.

Now You Try

Practice this concept

Marketing wants the minimum whole-thousand budget bucket that can contain each campaign spend.

Available schema

marketing

Prefix tables with marketing.table_name.

campaign_idspendthousand_bucket

marketing.campaigns

Column	Type
id	integer
name	text
channel	text
spend	numeric
start_date	date
end_date	date
status	text
target_segment	text
legacy_id	text

query.sql

Intermediate business practice