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Approximate Percentiles in Azure SQL DB and MI

Balmukund Lakhani announces a feature has gone generally available:

Today, we are announcing General Availability (GA) of native implementation of APPROX_PERCENTILE in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance. We announced preview of these functions in October 2022. Since then, many customers have adopted these for the applications where response time of percentile calculation was more important than the accuracy of the result.

I have and will continue to extol the virtues of these two functions wherever I go. They’re considerably better than the originals once you start getting into the hundreds of thousands or millions of rows. They’re also available in SQL Server 2022.