Mala Mahadevan looks at calculating range, variance, and standard deviation in R and T-SQL:
The first and most common measure of dispersion is called ‘Range‘. The range is just the difference between the maximum and minimum values in the dataset. It tells you how much gap there is between the two and therefore how wide the dataset is in terms of its values. It is however, quite misleading when you have outliers in the data. If you have one value that is very large or very small that can skew the Range and does not really mean you have values spanning the minimum to the maximum.
To lower this kind of an issue with outliers – a second variation of the range called Inter-Quartile Range, or IQR is used. The IQR is calculated by dividing the dataset into 4 equal parts after sorting the said value in ascending order. For the first and third part, the maximum values are taken and then subtracted from each other. The IQR ensures that you are looking at top and near-bottom ranges and therefore the value it gives is probably spanning the range.
Just like her previous post, this one also includes an example built for SQL Server R Services.