Re: wip: functions median and percentile

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Hitoshi Harada <umi.tanuki@gmail.com>
Cc: Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>, David Fetter <david@fetter.org>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2010-10-01T15:22:46Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Hitoshi Harada <umi.tanuki@gmail.com> writes:
> 2010/10/2 Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>:
>> The implementation I would've expected to see is to do the sort and then
>> have two code paths for retrieving the median, depending on whether the
>> sort result is all in memory or not.

> Hm? The problem we encountered in the middle of the patch is there is
> no chance to call tuplesort_end if median is called in moving frame
> window aggregate because final function is called multiple times
> during moving.

Well, if you haven't got a solution for that, then this patch isn't
ready for prime time.

It's entirely possible that median as a window function is intractable.
I'd rather have it throwing error than offer an implementation that will
fall over as soon as the window gets large.

			regards, tom lane