Even in times of a growing market of specialized NoSQL databases, the relevance of traditional RDBMS doesn't decline. Especially when it comes to the calculation of aggregates based on complex data sets that can not be processed as a batch like Map&Reduce. MySQL is already bringing in a handful of aggregate functions that can be useful for a statistical analysis. The best known of this type are certainly:
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN
