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 would think that this would be the simplest solution:

SELECT TOP N PERCENT FROM TheTable ORDER BY TheScore DESC

Where N = (100 - desired percentile). So if you wanted all rows in the 90th percentile, you'd select the top 10%.

I'm not sure what you mean by "preferably in a single record". Do you mean calculate which percentile a given score for a single record would fall into? e.g. do you want to be able to make statements like "your score is 83, which puts you in the 91st percentile." ?

EDIT: OK, I thought some more about your question and came up with this interpretation. Are you asking how to calculate the cutoff score for a particular percentile? e.g. something like this: to be in the 90th percentile you must have a score greater than 78.

If so, this query works. I dislike sub-queries though, so depending on what it was for, I'd probably try to find a more elegant solution. It does, however, return a single record with a single score.

-- Find the minimum score for all scores in the 90th percentile
SELECT Min(subq.TheScore) FROM
(SELECT TOP 10 PERCENT TheScore FROM TheTable
ORDER BY TheScore DESC) AS subq

Answer 2

i'd probably use a the sql server 2005

row_number() over (order by score ) / (select count(*) from scores)

or something along those lines.

Answer 3

i'd do something like:

select @n = count(*) from tbl1
select @median = @n / 2
select @p75 = @n * 3 / 4
select @p90 = @n * 9 / 10

select top 1 score from (select top @median score from tbl1 order by score asc) order by score desc

is this right?

Answer 4

Check out the NTILE command -- it will give you percentiles pretty easily!

SELECT  SalesOrderID, 
    OrderQty,
    RowNum = Row_Number() OVER(Order By OrderQty),
    Rnk = RANK() OVER(ORDER BY OrderQty),
    DenseRnk = DENSE_RANK() OVER(ORDER BY OrderQty),
    NTile4  = NTILE(4) OVER(ORDER BY OrderQty)
FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail 
WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43689, 63181)

Answer 5

How about this:

SELECT
  Group,
  75_percentile =  MAX(case when NTILE(4) OVER(ORDER BY score ASC) = 3 then score  else 0 end),
  90_percentile =  MAX(case when NTILE(10) OVER(ORDER BY score  ASC) = 9 then score  else 0 end)     
FROM TheScore
GROUP BY Group

Answer 6

Percentile is calculated by

(Rank -1) /(total_rows -1) when you sort values in ascending order.

The below query will give you percentile value between 0 and 1. Person with lowest marks will have 0 percentile.

SELECT Name, marks, (rank_1-1)/((select count(*) as total_1 from table)-1)as percentile_rank
from
(
SELECT Name,
       Marks,
       RANK() OVER (ORDER BY Marks) AS rank_1
       from table
) as A