Aggregate function

In database management, an aggregate function or aggregation function is a function where multiple values are processed together to form a single summary statistic.

Common aggregate functions include:

Others include:

Formally, an aggregate function takes as input a set, a multiset (bag), or a list from some input domain I and outputs an element of an output domain O. The input and output domains may be the same, such as for SUM, or may be different, such as for COUNT.

Aggregate functions occur commonly in numerous programming languages, in spreadsheets, and in relational algebra.

The listagg function, as defined in the SQL:2016 standard aggregates data from multiple rows into a single concatenated string.

In the entity relationship diagram, aggregation is represented as seen in Figure 1 with a rectangle around the relationship and its entities to indicate that it is being treated as an aggregate entity.

Aggregate functions present a bottleneck, because they potentially require having all input values at once. In distributed computing, it is desirable to divide such computations into smaller pieces, and distribute the work, usually computing in parallel, via a divide and conquer algorithm.