Excerpt:
Vertica, like other databases, provides a function – RANDOM() – returning uniformely-distributed random floats in [0,1). However, the predominant distribution for many measurable physical and social phenomenons is the Gaussian (normal) distribution. Normal distribution is ubiquitous: people’s height or weight, IQ scores, snowflakes size, the speed of molecules in ideal gas,… all follow (or are very well approximated by) the normal distribution.
The scope of this article is to show how easily we can “extend the horizon” of the native Vertica functionalities by writing our own functions. We’re going to implement a function returning normally-distributed numbers using two different methods: User Defined SQL Functions and User Defined Extension (UDx).
Check it out here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vertica- ... =prof-post