Alan, I agree with you, if you're just wanting one ranking. If we expand upon the Original Posters issue (which is what I was facing) and say that you want to different groupings, how would you handle that?

So, let's take the example and add a column.

--NTILE (and others, presumably) gotcha: NULL inputs are included as belonging to the bottom tile,

--displacing other values to higher tiles.

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb.dbo.#t', 'U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #t;

CREATE TABLE #t

(

ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,

val INT NULL,

val2 INT NULL

);

--INSERT 10 values: 3 NULL, 7 integers

INSERT INTO #t SELECT NULL,1;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT NULL,2;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT NULL,3;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT 5,4;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT 7,5;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT 8,6;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT 9,NULL;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT 9,NULL;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT 11,NULL;

INSERT INTO #t SELECT 12,NULL;

--Compute quartiles.

--With 7 non-NULL values, this should have 2-2-2-1 rows per quartile and the NULLs ignored (to my thinking).

--Instead, we get back tiles based on 10 rows of input, with 3-3-2-2 rows per quartile.

--The lowest real values of 5 and 7 are in Q2, not Q1, b/c the 3 NULLs are all the rows in Q1:

Suppose you want the results of this:

IDvalQval2Q2

1NULLNULL11

2NULLNULL21

3NULLNULL32

45142

57153

68264

792NULLNULL

893NULLNULL

9113NULLNULL

10124NULLNULL

How would you write the query then? That's the direction I was going.