Chapter 8. Statistics in SQL
The recipes in this chapter show you how to effectively use SQL for
common statistical operations. While SQL was never
designed
to be a statistics package, the language is quite versatile and holds
a lot of hidden potential when it comes to calculating the following
types of statistics:
In spite of the fact that you can use SQL to generate statistics, it
is not our intention to promote SQL as the best language for that
purpose. As in any other situation, a strong dose of common sense is
necessary. If you need a fast, easy-to-use tool for quick analysis of
an existing data set, then the concepts presented in this chapter may
prove quite helpful. However, if you need to perform a broad and
thorough statistical analysis, you may be better off loading an
extract of your database data into a
specialized statistics package such as
SPSS or GNU R.
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Statistical calculations often yield values with many digits to the
right of the decimal point. In this chapter, we've
rounded all such values to two decimal digits.
Thus, we will show a result of 672.98888888893032 as 672.99.
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