Re: wip: functions median and percentile

David Fetter <david@fetter.org> writes:
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 12:12:12PM -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote:
>> http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/median
>> 
>> If you do a google search for "median" and poke around, you'll find
>> many places where this is the only definition mentioned; the others
>> seem to be rather infrequently used.  Why not make the commone usage
>> convenient?

> The reason not to is the same reason that MEDIAN doesn't appear in the
> SQL standard, namely that what's common in one field is wrong in
> another.

Hmm, do you have any *evidence* that that's why it's not in the standard?

My own take on that is that it's reasonably probable that the SQL
committee might standardize a function by that name someday.  What we
need to be worrying about is the prospect that if there are multiple
definitions for the term, they might pick a different one than we did.
A name like "arithmetic_median" seems much less likely to get blindsided
by future standardization.

			regards, tom lane