Computing a Simple Moving Average

Moving Averages

Let’s review moving averages in brief before getting into implementation. By calculating a series of averages for the various subsets of the entire dataset, one can examine data points using the moving average technique. By smoothing out the data this is done to find trends or patterns....

Computing a Simple Moving Average

The simplest form of the moving average is the simple moving average which calculates the mean of the fixed number of the data points over a specified period. Let’s illustrate this with an example of computing a 5-day SMA for the daily stock prices....

Creating Sample Data

To demonstrate computing moving averages in the MySQL let’s first create some sample data. We’ll create a simple table with the two columns: date and value representing the date and corresponding numeric value....

Computing Moving Average

Now, let’s compute the moving average using the MySQL. We’ll use a window function to calculate the average of the last n rows where n is the window size....

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve explored how to compute moving averages in MySQL using the window functions. By applying moving averages to the data we can gain insights into the trends and patterns which can be valuable for various analytical tasks. Experiment with the different window sizes and datasets to see how moving averages can help better understand your data....