I've been asked to do something that I do not think is possible in SQL.
I have a query that has this basic form:
SELECT a, b, c, d, AVG(e), STD(e), CONCAT(x, ',', y) as f
FROM t
GROUP BY a, b, c, d, f
x and y are numbers (378.18, 2213.797 or 378.218, 2213.949 or
10053.490, 2542.094).
The business issue is that if either x or y in 2 rows that are in the
same a, b, c, d group are within 1 of each other then they should be
grouped together. And to make it more complicated, the tolerance is
applied as a rolling continuum. For example, if the x and y in a set
of grouped rows are:
row 1: 1.5, 9.5
row 2: 2.4, 20.8
row 3: 3.3, 40.6
row 4: 4.2, 2.5
row 5: 5.1, 10.1
row 6: 6.0, 7.9
row 7: 8.0, 21.0
row 8: 100, 200
1 through 6 get combined because all their X values are within the
tolerance of some other X in the set that's been combined. 7's Y value
is within the tolerance of 2's Y, so that should be combined as well.
8 is not combined because neither the X or Y value is within the
tolerance of any X or Y in the set that was combined.
In python I can easily parse the data and identify the rows that need
to be combined, but then I've lost the ability to calculate the
average and std. The only way I can think of to do this is to remove
the grouping from the SQL and do all the grouping and aggregating
myself. But this query often returns 20k to 30k rows after grouping.
It could easily be 80k to 100k rows that I have to process if I remove
the grouping and I think that will be very slow.
Anyone have any ideas?
