frequency analysis of a DB column

[gagsl-py2 at yahoo.com.ar (Gabriel Genellina)]

En Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:21:53 -0300, goldtech <goldtech at worldpost.com>  
escribi?:

> In Python 2.1 are there any tools to take a column from a DB and do a
> frequency analysis - a breakdown of the values for this column?
>
> Possibly a histogram or a table saying out of 500 records I have one
> hundred and two "301" ninety-eight "212" values and three-hundred
> "410"?
> Is SQL the way to for this?

I'd start with:

select column, count(column), min(column), max(column)
 from table
group by column
order by count(column) desc

and then build an histogram from that (using PyChart for instance). Based  
on this distribution curve, one can refine the analysis in a lot of ways...

> Of course there'd be 1000's of values....

Should not be a problem for today's DBMS and hardware...

-- 
Gabriel Genellina