Using MEDIAN along side MAX, MIN, and AVG functions in MySQL

Question

I have the following MySQL query which is working perfectly:

select 
    count(*) as `# of Data points`, 
    name, 
    max((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000) as `MAX Thousand Price`,
    min((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000) as `MIN Thousand Price`,
    avg((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000) as `MEAN Thousand Price` 
from 
    table_name 
where 
    year(date) >= 2012 and 
    name like "%the_name%" and 
    QNTYDelivered > 0 and 
    QNTY_Sell > 0 
group by name 
order by name;

Now I wish to also add a result column that gives me the MEDIAN of the data for each line. Under SELECT this would look like this in a perfect world:

median((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000) as `MEDIAN Thousand Price`

Searching Google for a MySQL median function brought me to this answer, which seems ok if you are interested in the median of a data set for an entire table: Simple way to calculate median with MySQL

The difference here is that I am grouping the data in my table by the name column, and want to get the median for each line of the data grouped by this column.

Does anyone know a nifty trick to allow me to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The only way I found to do this is through string manipulation:
with GROUP_CONCAT a list of all value is created then with indented SUBSTRING_INDEX the median value is taken

SELECT
    count(*) AS `# of Data points`,
    name,
    max((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000) AS `MAX Thousand Price`,
    min((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000) AS `MIN Thousand Price`,
    avg((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000) AS `MEAN Thousand Price`
  , CASE (count(*) % 2)
    WHEN 1 THEN SUBSTRING_INDEX(
      SUBSTRING_INDEX(
        group_concat((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000 
                      ORDER BY (QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000 SEPARATOR ',')
      , ',', (count(*) + 1) / 2)
    , ',', -1)
    ELSE (SUBSTRING_INDEX(
      SUBSTRING_INDEX(
        group_concat((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000 
                      ORDER BY (QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000 SEPARATOR ',')
      , ',', count(*) / 2)
    , ',', -1)
  + SUBSTRING_INDEX(
      SUBSTRING_INDEX(
        group_concat((QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000 
                      ORDER BY (QNTY_Sell/QNTYDelivered)*1000 SEPARATOR ',')
      , ',', (count(*) + 1) / 2)
    , ',', -1)) / 2
    END median
FROM
    sales
WHERE
    year(date) >= 2012 AND
    name LIKE "%art.%" AND
    QNTYDelivered > 0 AND
    QNTY_Sell > 0
GROUP BY name
ORDER BY name;  

The CASE is needed to check if we have a single median value, with an odd number of values, or two median values, with an even number of values, in the second case the median is the mean of the two values founded.

SQLFiddle