How to Compute a Moving Average in PL/SQL?

How to Compute a Moving Average in PL/SQL?

A moving average is a statistical technique used to analyze and determine some specific trends in our given data set. It creates a series of averages of different subsets of the full data set. We can reduce noise in our data set as well as it also helps us in making predictions by analyzing recent trends of our data. Some different methods we will cover in this article are mentioned below :...

1. Using Basic Approach

In this example, we are going to implement very basic or naive approach. We will iterate through each record using for – loop. While iterating we will accumulate score and create a moving average based on a specified window size or number of specified columns. It is easy to understand approach. However, it has limited error handling. It lacks some robust error handling mechanism as we have in some standard PL/SQL queries. We will overcome this in our next method....

2. Using AVG() function

In this example, we are going to calculate the moving average using AVG() function. Unlike the previous one, we will compute the moving average keeping all the corner cases in our mind. Instead of explicitly managing cumulative sum and count of the column we will utilize AVG() function of SQL to do so. It is a more concise approach then the first one....

Conclusion

Overall, moving average is a statistical technique of calculating some recent trends of our specified dataset. It helps in identifying trends, predictions etc. We can follow some basic approach to compute the moving average but as we have seen in the article, it has some consequences. It lacks some basic error handling. To overcome this, we have used AVG() function of SQL. Instead of explicitly managing sum or count of the columns, we can use AVG() function instead. In this article, we have covered both the approaches explaining pros and cons. Now, you have a good knowledge of computing moving average in PL/SQL. Now you can write queries related to it and can obtain the desired output....