On 16 July 2014 20:35, Pavel Stehule <pavel.steh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > 2014-07-16 10:04 GMT+02:00 Petr Jelinek <p...@2ndquadrant.com>: > >> On 08/07/14 02:14, Tom Lane wrote: >>> >>> Petr Jelinek <p...@2ndquadrant.com> writes: >>>> >>>> here is a patch implementing varwidth_bucket (naming is up for >>>> discussion) function which does binning with variable bucket width. >>> >>> >>> I didn't see any discussion of the naming question in this thread. >>> I'd like to propose that it should be just "width_bucket()"; we can >>> easily determine which function is meant, considering that the >>> SQL-spec variants don't take arrays and don't even have the same >>> number of actual arguments. >> >> >> I did mention in submission that the names are up for discussion, I am all >> for naming it just width_bucket. > > > I had this idea too - but I am not sure if it is good idea. A distance > between ANSI SQL with_bucket and our enhancing is larger than in our > implementation of "median" for example. > > I can live with both names, but current name I prefer.
Hmmm, not sure. Let's look around and think what words people use. Transforms of this type are referred to as discretization in formal literature and as binning in commong usage/statistical software. width_bucket() seems to refer to an equal-width binning process. The function being discussed here is a generic mechanism, the boundaries of which could have been decided using equal-frequency or other mechanisms. Using the word "width" in those contexts could be confusing. Given width_bucket() is already in use for SQL Standard function, I agree it would be confusing to have same name for different parameter profiles. So I suggest that we use the more generic function name bin(), with a second choice of discretize() (though that seems annoyingly easy to spell incorrectly) Whatever we do, it seems clear we need a section in the manual to describe Statistical Functions, including width_bucket(), whatever we call this function and including the terms bin, binning, transform, discretize and discretization to ensure those are easily searchable. -- Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
