How to select standard deviation within a row? (in SQL - or R :)

Question

I wonder whether there is a way to select the standard deviation from several integer fields in MySQL within the same row. Obviously, if I use

Answer 1

Have you tried using UNION to effectively put all your column values into separate rows? Something like this, maybe:

SELECT STDDEV(allcols)
FROM (
    SELECT col1 FROM table WHERE id=requiredID
    UNION
    SELECT col2 FROM table WHERE id=requiredID
    UNION
    SELECT col3 FROM table WHERE id=requiredID
    UNION
    SELECT col4 FROM table WHERE id=requiredID
    UNION
    SELECT col5 FROM table WHERE id=requiredID
)