Average Help

if I have a bunch of times, and want an average of them, how do I do that?
Thanks.
For more details, see this thread:
http://www.dbforums.com/showthread.php?t=1215633use the AVG aggregate function (with GROUP BY if you want an average per something, without GROUP BY if you want the average for the whole result set)|||That doesn't work for arguments of the type datetime.|||That doesn't work for arguments of the type datetime.you shoulda said that already in post #1 :)

can you please tell me what average you expect for the following datetime values --

september 15, 1975
october 23, 2006
april 1, 1999|||.. I dunno

Whatever the middle date is...

There should be a way to do it, no?|||i guess what i was trying to point out is that averaging datetimes doesn't make sense

you could try SELECT AVG(CAST datetimecol AS INTEGER) but would you really recognize 34303 as a valid answer?

okay, you could cast that back as datetime, and you'd get December 2, 1993

is that acceptable?|||Well, if you look @. the forum that I posted the url to, I actually wanted an average of differences. I have a start time, and a stop time, and I subtracted them, but the result was still a date-time format so I couldn't take the average of it. I want the averages of the difference in times, I dunno what format yet (ie, days, hours, minutes, seconds).. How is it done in minutes?

Thanks|||my advice for finding the average of a number of date differences is to calculate the differences using the DATEDIFF function with seconds as the datepart parameter

note: "DATEDIFF produces an error if the result is out of range for integer values. For milliseconds, the maximum number is 24 days, 20 hours, 31 minutes and 23.647 seconds. For seconds, the maximum number is 68 years." (BOL)

take the average, and then convert the result back into whatever format you wish|||Well, if you look @. the forum that I posted the url to, I actually wanted an average of differences. I have a start time, and a stop time, and I subtracted them, but the result was still a date-time format so I couldn't take the average of it. I want the averages of the difference in times, I dunno what format yet (ie, days, hours, minutes, seconds).. How is it done in minutes?

Thanks
The average of the differences is just the Max minus the Min divided by the number of data pairs:select (Max([DateValue])-Min([DateValue]))/(count(*)-1) as AverageDifference
from [YourTable]
or this, which is probably better:select DateDiff(minute, Min([DateValue]), Max([DateValue]))/(count(*)-1) as AverageDifference
from [YourTable]