Calculating percentile rankings in MS SQL

Question

What\'s the best way to calculate percentile rankings (e.g. the 90th percentile or the median score) in MSSQL 2005?

I\'d like to be able to select the 25th, median,

Answer 1

I've been working on this a little more, and here's what I've come up with so far:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[TestGetPercentile]

@percentile as float,
@resultval as float output

AS

BEGIN

WITH scores(score, prev_rank, curr_rank, next_rank) AS (
    SELECT dblScore,
        (ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( ORDER BY dblScore ) - 1.0) / ((SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TestScores) + 1)  [prev_rank],
        (ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( ORDER BY dblScore ) + 0.0) / ((SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TestScores) + 1)  [curr_rank],
        (ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( ORDER BY dblScore ) + 1.0) / ((SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TestScores) + 1)  [next_rank]
    FROM TestScores
)

SELECT @resultval = (
    SELECT TOP 1 
    CASE WHEN t1.score = t2.score
        THEN t1.score
    ELSE
        t1.score + (t2.score - t1.score) * ((@percentile - t1.curr_rank) / (t2.curr_rank - t1.curr_rank))
    END
    FROM scores t1, scores t2
    WHERE (t1.curr_rank = @percentile OR (t1.curr_rank < @percentile AND t1.next_rank > @percentile))
        AND (t2.curr_rank = @percentile OR (t2.curr_rank > @percentile AND t2.prev_rank < @percentile))
)

END

Then in another stored procedure I do this:

DECLARE @pct25 float;
DECLARE @pct50 float;
DECLARE @pct75 float;

exec SurveyGetPercentile .25, @pct25 output
exec SurveyGetPercentile .50, @pct50 output
exec SurveyGetPercentile .75, @pct75 output

Select
    min(dblScore) as minScore,
    max(dblScore) as maxScore,
    avg(dblScore) as avgScore,
    @pct25 as percentile25,
    @pct50 as percentile50,
    @pct75 as percentile75
From TestScores

It still doesn't do quite what I'm looking for. This will get the stats for all tests; whereas I would like to be able to select from a TestScores table that has multiple different tests in it and get back the same stats for each different test (like I have in my example table in my question).