Recently I ran across this post on how to do subgroup medians in Excel 2010. First you need to create a pivot table, then “do some copying and pasting and use a formula to make it happen”. In SQL you can do this with one command.
Suppose that you have the same table as the Excel article, something like this:
CREATE TABLE sampletab (arrest_day_of_week varchar2(10), arrest_ts TIMESTAMP, fingerprint_ts TIMESTAMP, days_between NUMBER);
and you want to get the median value of days_between for each day of the week.
The steps in Excel apparently go like this:
- Create pivot table to get the means
- Copy and paste the column values from the pivot table
- For Sunday, create an IF formula to include a cell’s days_between in the median calculation only if the arrest_day_of_week for that row is Sunday
- Repeat for other six days
Ouch!
In SQL, it’s one simple statement:
SELECT arrest_day_of_week, median(days_between) AS median_days_between FROM sampletab GROUP BY arrest_day_of_week;
Conclusion – if you’re into data analysis, SQL can be a big time-saver!