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T-SQL Medians

Daniel Hutmacher has a post showing how to calculate medians and percentiles in T-SQL:

Medians as a concept are simple enough. If you have a large number of values, like a range of statistical values, you want to pick the middle one. The median, as opposed to the average is useful for a number of reasons, one of them that you can reduce the effect of so-called outlier values.

The fact that SQL Server doesn’t have a fast, built-in median function surprises me, to be honest.  The best alternative I’ve found was a CLR function in SQL#.