Calculation percentage on non-numeric columns

Hello,
trying to calculate the percentages of artist's from each country in our database.

I am drawing from 2 tables, the artists table which has a short country code and the citylatlong table which has the full country name.

Since the artists.country column is a varchar(2), is it possible to get the number of artists per country as a percentage.

Here's the query I'm trying:

SELECT artists.id, artists.country, countries.countryLONG, (SUM( artists.country ) / COUNT(artists.country )) *100 percentage FROM artists inner join (select countrySHORT, countryLONG from citylatlong GROUP BY countrySHORT, countryLONG) countries ON artists.country = countries.countrySHORT GROUP BY country ORDER BY country ASC limit 10 ;

The percentage column always comes out as 0.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Clem c

found the solution - here it be:

SELECT c.country, 100.0 * COUNT(*) / ( SELECT COUNT(*) FROM artists ) AS percentage FROM artists
INNER JOIN ( SELECT countrySHORT , MAX(countryLONG) AS country FROM citylatlong GROUP BY countrySHORT) AS c ON c.countrySHORT = artists.country
GROUP BY c.country ORDER BY c.country ASC

Hi Clem, have you tried casting artists.country column like this:

cast(artists.country as decimal)

in such way, it will be a valid divisor.