Re: wip: functions median and percentile

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 12:49:45PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> >> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >>> I am sending a prototype implementation of functions median and
> >>> percentile. This implementation is very simple and I moved it to
> >>> contrib for this moment - it is more easy maintainable. Later I'll
> >>> move it to core.
> >
> >> So if the entire result set fits in memory it would be nice to use the
> >> O(n) Quickselect algorithm -- which would only be a small change to
> >> the existing Quicksort code -- instead of sorting the entire set.
> >
> > That seems like rather a lot of added infrastructure for functions whose
> > popularity is at best unknown.  I think we should KISS for the first
> > implementation.
>
> +1. I think the functions are useful, but the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Percentile is already there as NTILE, a windowing function. Median
may be useful, but we pretty much can't just call it "median."
Instead, we need to call it something like "left_median" or
"arithmetic_median."

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com
iCal: webcal://www.tripit.com/feed/ical/people/david74/tripit.ics

Remember to vote!
Consider donating to Postgres: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate