>>>Hello,
>>>
>>>I have a table with 1,500 records and with one column: ID, comprised of numeric data ranging from 1 - 1,591. As the
>>>numbers get higher, the frequency of their appearance increases. But what's important, is not so much any given value
>>>but how many numbers appear within a given range. And yes, I am trying to figure out a cutoff point that will separate
>>>this table into the numbers that appear with the highest frequency (they happen to be larger numbers, in this table)
>>>and numbers that appear less frequently (they happen to be smaller numbers.)
>>>So, I want to know if certain values appear more often than others, kind of like a heat map, except the response would
>>>be in a tabular form rather than in graphic.. Is there a way to use an SQL statement to do this? Can I preselect
>>>the number of ranges and their size, for example: break the table up into 20 ranges. But I can't know
>>>which values each of the 20 ranges will have in advance? I know it's a vague question but I wondered
>>>what you all might say as this kind of question is coming up a lot.
>>>
>>>Thank you,
>>>Steve
>>
>>Hi, Steve,
>>
>>Can you post the table structure (at least for the relevant columns)?
>
>table name: MY_IDS
>field name: ID
>data type: numeric
>range of values in ID: 1 - 1,591
>number of rows: 1,500
>
>(I tried to upload the dbf but the system won't allow it.)

Try

;with counts as (select Id, count(Id) as frequency
from My_IDS
group by Id)

select *, NTILE(5) OVER (order by Frequency)
from counts -- group into 5 different buckets in order of the frequency

The above is for SQL Server.