SQL POWER

Raises a number to an exponent — POWER(base, exponent) — used for compound growth calculations and exact squaring/cubing.

What & Why

POWER(base, exponent) computes base raised to exponent. Beyond simple squaring, this is the building block for compound growth formulas — projecting a value forward across multiple periods of the same growth rate.

See How It Works

BUSINESS QUESTION

Marketing wants the squared and square-root transformations of campaign spend for a modeling export.

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,
  ROUND(POWER(spend, 2), 2) AS spend_squared,
  ROUND(SQRT(spend), 2) AS spend_root
FROM marketing.campaigns
ORDER BY campaign_id;

RESULT — exact output from the displayed Queryflo rows

campaign_id	spend	spend_squared	spend_root
1	55000.00	3025000000.00	234.52
2	45000.00	2025000000.00	212.13
3	50000.00	2500000000.00	223.61
4	60000.00	3600000000.00	244.95

Both transformations are rounded to two decimals in the displayed query.

Now You Try

Practice this concept

Return every campaign spend, its square, and its square root rounded to two decimals, ordered by campaign id.

Available schema

marketing

Prefix tables with marketing.table_name.

campaign_idspendspend_squaredspend_root

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