Percentile Understanding

[sxschech]

Previously I dumped data from Oracle to Excel to do percentiles. Today, I learned how to derive percentiles within Oracle. However, Oracle and Excel seem to be working opposite in the results.

[tt]
RESULT
470 EXCEL = PERCENTILE(N6:N899,0.25)
570 ORACLE = PERCENTILE_CONT(0.25) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY to_number(SAT_READ) DESC) "25Median cont",

570 EXCEL = PERCENTILE(N6:N899,0.75)
470 ORACLE = PERCENTILE_CONT(0.75) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY to_number(SAT_READ) DESC) "75Median cont"

[/tt]

Does this mean that if I want to show the 25th percentile from Oracle I should use 0.75 and for the 75th percentile I should use 0.25 or am I misunderstanding how things work.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
These may help ( if you have not already reviewed them):

http://filibeto.org/sun/lib/nonsun/oracle/10.2.0.1.0/B19306_01/server.102/b14200/functions110.htm

Or here:

http://www.psoug.org/reference/number_func.html

or maybe here:

http://www.java2s.com/Tutorial/Orac...percentilevalueforacontinuousdistribution.htm

( I know just posting Googled results is not real help, but it can sometimes point the way to your answer)





To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[sxschech]

Thanks for the links Turkbear. I realized what the difference was after I left work (and wasn't at a computer to check it out). The query sample that I copied for Oracle was sorted Descending and the sample in Excel was sorted Ascending. Once I deleted the DESC from the Oracle query, the results matched what I had in Excel.