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Calculate Median in MySQL

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Median :
In statistics and probability theory, Median is a value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution. In lay-man language, Median is the middle value of a sorted listed of values.

Calculate Median value in MySQL
Consider a table demo where Name is the student name and Distance is the total distance (in km) from their home to college.

Name Distance
Sumit 25
Jaskirat 35
Sukrut 20
Shivam 20
Sanchit 45
Prince 35
Keshav 15
Preet 25
Saurav 20

We calculate the median of the Distance from the demo table.
Query –

SET @rowindex := -1;
 
SELECT
   AVG(d.distance) as Median 
FROM
   (SELECT @rowindex:=@rowindex + 1 AS rowindex,
           demo.distance AS distance
    FROM demo
    ORDER BY demo.distance) AS d
WHERE
d.rowindex IN (FLOOR(@rowindex / 2), CEIL(@rowindex / 2));

Explanation :

  1. Beginning with the internal subquery – the select assigns @rowindex as an incremental index for each distance that is selected and sorts the distance.
  2. Once we have the sorted list of distances, the outer query will fetch the middle items in the array. If the array contains an odd number of items, both values will be the single middle value.
  3. Then, the SELECT clause of the outer query returns the average of those two values as the median value.

Output –

25.0000

Last Updated : 14 Jul, 2020
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