Inside Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008: T-SQL Querying

A Practical Application

In the final section of this chapter, I’ll describe a real-world process control problem I encountered about 10 years ago and was able to solve with an efficient algorithm that had only recently been published in a mathematics journal. This real-world problem concerns the identification of a trend marker in a series of measurements of toxin levels. In the following description, I’ve simplified the scenario but not the algorithm, which eventually received governmental certification and was used for environmental monitoring.

Identifying Trends in Measurement Data

The ongoing debate about global warming underlines the fact that there is no simple criterion for identifying an increasing trend in a series of measurements. Many ...