A common business metric is to compare activity for some variable in a current time period to the activity for the same variable in another time period a fixed distance in the past. For example, you might want to compare current sales volume against sales volume for preceding quarters. This is a moving difference calculation where value_expression would be the quarterly sales volume, width is 4, and sort_expression might be the quarter_of_calendar column from the SYS_CALENDAR.Calendar system view.