T-SQL calculate moving average

Question

I am working with SQL Server 2008 R2, trying to calculate a moving average. For each record in my view, I would like to collect the values of the 250 previous records, and t

Answer 1

The window functions in SQL 2008 are rather limited compared to later versions and if I remember correct you can only partition and you can't use any rows/range frame limit but I think this might be what you want:

;WITH cte (rn, transactionid, value) AS (
    SELECT 
       rn = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY transactionid),
       transactionid,
       value
    FROM your_table
)

SELECT 
    transactionid, 
    value, 
    movagv = (
        SELECT AVG(value) 
        FROM cte AS inner_ref
        -- average is calculated for 250 previous to current row inclusive
        -- I might have set the limit one row to large, maybe it should be 249
        WHERE inner_ref.rn BETWEEN outer_ref.rn-250 AND outer_ref.rn
        ) 
FROM cte AS outer_ref

Note that it applies a correlated sub-query to every row and performance might not be great.

With the later versions you could have used window frame functions and done something like this:

SELECT 
    transactionid, 
    value,
    -- avg over the 250 rows counting from the previous row
    AVG(value) OVER (ORDER BY transactionid  
                     ROWS BETWEEN 251 PRECEDING AND 1 PRECEDING),
    -- or 250 rows counting from current
    AVG(value) OVER (ORDER BY transactionid  
                     ROWS BETWEEN 250 PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW)
FROM your_table