how to filter data in sql based on percentile - sql

Question

I have 2 tables, the first one is contain customer information such as id,age, and name . the second table is contain their id, information of product they purchase, and the purchase_date (the date is from 2016 to 2018)
Table 1
-------
customer_id
customer_age
customer_name
Table2
------
customer_id
product
purchase_date
my desired result is to generate the table that contain customer_name and product who made purchase in 2017 and older than 75% of customer that make purchase in 2016.

Answer 1

Depending on your flavor of SQL, you can get quartiles using the more general ntile analytical function. This basically adds a new column to your query.
SELECT MIN(customer_age) as min_age FROM (
SELECT customer_id, customer_age, ntile(4) OVER(ORDER BY customer_age) AS q4 FROM table1
WHERE customer_id IN (
SELECT customer_id FROM table2 WHERE purchase_date = 2016)
) q
WHERE q4=4
This returns the lowest age of the 4th-quartile customers, which can be used in a subquery against the customers who made purchases in 2017.
The argument to ntile is how many buckets you want to divide into. In this case 75%+ equals 4th quartile, so 4 buckets is OK. The OVER() clause specifies what you want to sort by (customer_age in our case), and also lets us partition (group) the data if we want to, say, create multiple rankings for different years or countries.

Answer 2

Age is a horrible field to include in a database. Every day it changes. You should have date-of-birth or something similar.
To get the 75% oldest value in 2016, there are several possibilities. I usually go for row_number() and count(*):
select min(customer_age)
from (select c.*,
row_number() over (order by customer_age) as seqnum,
count(*) over () as cnt
from customers c join
where exists (select 1
from customer_products cp
where cp.customer_id = c.customer_id and
cp.purchase_date >= '2016-01-01' and
cp.purchase_date < '2017-01-01'
)
)
where seqnum >= 0.75 * cnt;
Then, to use this for a query for 2017:
with a2016 as (
select min(customer_age) as customer_age
from (select c.*,
row_number() over (order by customer_age) as seqnum,
count(*) over () as cnt
from customers c
where exists (select 1
from customer_products cp
where cp.customer_id = c.customer_id and
cp.purchase_date >= '2016-01-01' and
cp.purchase_date < '2017-01-01'
)
) c
where seqnum >= 0.75 * cnt
)
select c.*, cp.product_id
from customers c join
customer_products cp
on cp.customer_id = c.customer_id and
cp.purchase_date >= '2017-01-01' and
cp.purchase_date < '2018-01-01' join
a2016 a
on c.customer_age >= a.customer_age;