Date: 2026-01-30
Time: 10:50–11:40
Room: Ballroom A
Level: Intermediate
Calculating percentiles/quantiles is a part of many common analytical tasks. Calculating them exactly is expensive, and it's difficult to apply some of the usual strategies - calculate them incrementally, or pre-calculate the results. So what can we do about it?
In this talk I'll show lesser-known ways to calculate estimates or percentiles (you can also say it's approximating the percentiles). I'll talk about extensions tdigest/ddsketch, and possibly some additional ones. I'll explain the ideas these extensions (or rather the user-defined data types) are based on. We'll also see how we can use this to generate histograms, which is a representation understandable for many users.