""todderamaa"" <todd.compass-cama@...> wrote in message
news:9v0aei+8e53@......

>
> I was just looking at some documentation about ORACLE and I found that
> it provides additional Aggregate Functions to Count, Max, Min, etc.
> The ones that we would very much like to see are VARIANCE, STDDEV and
> ABS. There are other statistical measures that would be of benefit.

Aren't variance and stddev an expression of sum() and count() basically? You
could do this:

select udf_variance(sum(), count())
from tbl
group by somefield

There's a doco at Borland were it's shown the inconvenience of polluting the
BLR namespace with a lot of statistical and math function and that they are
better implemented in UDFs. What still doesn't make sense in my brain is why
the server commits suicide when a UDF has a math error like a division by
zero. This is by design and I'm in favor of changing it.

In the meantime, I think I've found a nice way to implement abs(), iif(),
coalesce(), isnull() and "case" as native functions without adding new BLR
verbs to the core engine... but this will be for FB2.

C.
--
Claudio Valderrama C. - http://www.cvalde.com - http://www.firebirdSql.org
Independent developer
Owner of the Interbase® WebRing