Like other mainstream commercial database systems, SQL Server supports analytic functions in Transact-SQL to depict complex analytical tasks. With the help of these analytic functions, we can perform common analyses, such as ranking, percentiles, moving averages and cumulative sums that can be expressed concisely in a single SQL statement.

The first batch of Transact-SQL analytic functions came with the release of SQL Server 2005, which included a variety of ranking functions, such as ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK and NTILE. SQL Server 2012 introduced eight more Transact-SQL analytic functions: PERCENT_RANK, CUME_DIST, PERCENTILE_CONT, PERCENTILE_DISC, LEAD, LAG, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE.

Checkout my article here, in which I explained and demonstrated the use of Transact-SQL analytic functions. With the help of these analytic functions, we can quickly solve complex analytical tasks and also eliminate the use of programming self-joins, correlated subqueries and/or use fewer temporary tables compared to the counterparts without such functions.

This article is published on SearchSQLServer.techtarget.com.