I've written a small patch to add support for pow() in pgbench.
The main reason behind it is that I'm currently using a shell call to do it which takes between 2-10 ms that can be a big percentage of the time taken by the whole transaction. For example (shortened):
latency average = 11.718 ms
- statement latencies in milliseconds:
2.834 \setshell POWER2 awk 'BEGIN {p=2^ARGV[1]; print p }' :ZOOM_CURRENT
8.846 SELECT ST_AsBinary(ST_Simplify(ST_SnapToGrid("the_geom_webmercator",:SNAP), :SIMPLIFY)) AS geom FROM
I've also updated the related docs and added some tests. Please let me know if I'm missing anything.