Date: 2013-05-15 15:07:33 +0200
From: Anthony Damico <>
To: SQL devs <>
Version: 11.17.9 (Jan2014)
CC: ajdamico, @hannesmuehleisen, monetdbuser

Last updated: 2014-03-04 09:54:25 +0100

Comment 18733

Date: 2013-05-15 15:07:33 +0200
From: Anthony Damico <>

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Build Identifier:

As originally requested by Martin[1] (and agreed to by Niels on the mailing list), I'd like to request that the median() function be expanded to a quantile() function that allows the calculation of all percentiles, instead of just the 50th.

I believe this would be a useful addition for the new statistical user-base that the MonetDB.R project is starting to attract. :)

If this function works like the quantile() function in the R language, it would require two inputs: quantile( COLUMN_NAME , percentile_value )

The following pairs of commands should be equivalent in all cases:

quantile( COLUMN_NAME , 0.5 ) == median( COLUMN_NAME )
quantile( COLUMN_NAME , 0 ) == min( COLUMN_NAME )
quantile( COLUMN_NAME , 1 ) == max( COLUMN_NAME )

Hopefully, the bulk of the work to create the median() function can be quickly expanded for this purpose.

Thanks for considering this!

[1] http://osdir.com/ml/db.monetdb.bugs/2008-06/msg00206.html

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Not relevant - feature request

Comment 19662

Date: 2014-03-04 09:54:25 +0100
From: @hannesmuehleisen

Jan2014 includes quantile() support