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@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> >> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.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.
-- 
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