Re: Review: listagg aggregate

One situation where this could actually matter in the long term is if we
want to have an optimization for aggregate functions whose state variables
can be combined. this could be important if we ever want to do parallel
processing someday.

So we could have, for example two subjobs build two sublists and then
combiner the two lists later. in that case the separator might not be the
one the user expected - our put another way the one the user expected might
not be available when we need it.

We could say this isn't a problem because not all aggregate functions will
be amenable to such an optimization and perhaps this will just be one of
them. Alternately we could just have faith that a solution will be found -
it doesn't seem like it should be an insoluble problem to me.

greg

On 28 Jan 2010 15:57, "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 9:01 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel....
Yeah. The real issue here is that in some cases you'd like to have
non-aggregated parameters to an aggregate, but SQL has no notation
to express that.

I think Pavel's underlying complaint is that if the delimiter
argument isn't constant, then we're exposing an implementation
dependency in terms of just which values get separated by which
delimiters. The most practical implementation seems to be that
the first-call delimiter isn't actually used at all, and on
subsequent calls the delimiter *precedes* the associated value,
which is a bit surprising given the order in which one writes
them. Not sure if this is worth documenting though. Those two
or three people who actually try it will figure it out soon enough.

regards, tom lane

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