Important Points About SQL Server NTILE() Function
- The NTILE() function is a window function that distributes rows of an ordered partition into a specified number of approximately equal groups, or buckets.
- It assigns each group a bucket number starting from one.
- If the total of rows is divisible by the
buckets
, the function divides evenly the rows among buckets.- If the number of rows is not divisible by the
buckets
, the NTILE() function returns groups of two sizes with the difference by one.- Proper indexing on columns used in the
ORDER BY
clause within theOVER()
partition can improve performance when using NTILE() on large datasets- It is useful for creating histograms, analyzing rankings, or dividing data to allow parallel processing.
SQL Server NTILE() Function
SQL NTILE() function is a window function that distributes rows of an ordered partition into a pre-defined number of roughly equal groups.