Simple way to calculate median with MySQL

Question

What\'s the simplest (and hopefully not too slow) way to calculate the median with MySQL? I\'ve used AVG(x) for finding the mean, but I\'m having a hard time fi

Answer 1

After reading all previous ones they didn't match with my actual requirement so I implemented my own one which doesn't need any procedure or complicate statements, just I GROUP_CONCAT all values from the column I wanted to obtain the MEDIAN and applying a COUNT DIV BY 2 I extract the value in from the middle of the list like the following query does :

(POS is the name of the column I want to get its median)

(query) SELECT
SUBSTRING_INDEX ( 
   SUBSTRING_INDEX ( 
       GROUP_CONCAT(pos ORDER BY CAST(pos AS SIGNED INTEGER) desc SEPARATOR ';') 
    , ';', COUNT(*)/2 ) 
, ';', -1 ) AS `pos_med`
FROM table_name
GROUP BY any_criterial

I hope this could be useful for someone in the way many of other comments were for me from this website.