8

I need an aggregate function that MySQL doesn't provide.

I would like it to be in MySQL's flavor of SQL (that is, not in C).

How do I do this? What I'm stuck on is creating an aggregate function -- the docs don't seem to mention how this is done.

Examples of desired usage of a product function:

mysql> select product(col) as a from `table`;
+------+
| a    |
+------+
|  144 |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select col, product(col) as a from `table` group by col;
+-----+------+
| col | a    |
+-----+------+
|   6 |   36 |
|   4 |    4 |
+-----+------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)
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7

According to the documentation http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/adding-udf.html it's only possible to write aggregate functions in C. Sorry!

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  • Either C or C++. Not SQL, anyway. – Mike Sherrill 'Cat Recall' Oct 18 '12 at 0:49
  • 1
    I presume any language which can generate binary libraries in the platform-supported binary format with C calling conventions. – Colin 't Hart Oct 18 '12 at 7:30
  • I don't know. It was documented as "C or C++ (or another language that can use C calling conventions)" in version 5.0. The docs dropped "or another language that can use C calling conventions" in version 5.1. That's a strange phrase to drop. – Mike Sherrill 'Cat Recall' Oct 18 '12 at 10:18
  • is it available in recent mysql versions now (after few years) ? – Dinesh Jun 23 '17 at 16:01
9

I don't know if there is way to define a new aggregate function, not without messing with MySQL source code.

But if your numbers are all positive, you may well derive from the arithmetic identity:

log( product( Ai ) ) = sum( log( Ai ) )

that you can use EXP(SUM(LOG(x))) to calculate PRODUCT(x). Test in SQL-Fiddle:

SELECT EXP(SUM(LOG(a))) AS product
FROM t ;

SELECT col, EXP(SUM(LOG(a))) AS product
FROM t 
GROUP BY col ;

When the data can have 0s, it gets a bit more complicated:

SELECT (NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM t WHERE a = 0)) 
       * EXP(SUM(LOG(a))) AS p
FROM t 
WHERE a > 0 ;

SELECT d.col, 
       (NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM t AS ti WHERE ti.col = d.col AND ti.a = 0)) 
       * COALESCE(EXP(SUM(LOG(t.a))),1)  AS p
FROM 
    ( SELECT DISTINCT col
      FROM t
    ) AS d
  LEFT JOIN
    t  ON  t.col = d.col
       AND t.a > 0
GROUP BY d.col ;

Tested at SQL-Fiddle

For other DBMS, that do not have MySQL's auto-conversion of boolean values to integers, the

(NOT EXISTS (SELECT ...))

should be replaced with:

(CASE WHEN EXISTS (SELECT 1...) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END)

Specifically for Oracle, a few more changes will be needed, without changing the logic of the answer, only because Oracle does not follow strict ANSI standard in some areas. Tested at SQL-Fiddle-2

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  • 2
    That's sweet. High school math has come back to haunt me. +1 !!! – RolandoMySQLDBA Apr 30 '12 at 21:49
  • 1
    Cool math, but I actually wanted to know how to create an aggregate function in general. product was just supposed to be one example of several. – Matt Fenwick Apr 30 '12 at 23:01
  • This is pretty cool, but doesn't work if any of the values are zero, since log(0) is undefined. – jameshfisher Apr 30 '14 at 17:30
  • @jameshfisher Correct. One can write easily the extra condition, checking for zeros (where the product would be zero of course). I didn't think at the time it was necessary to add that complication. – ypercubeᵀᴹ Apr 30 '14 at 17:40
  • It's not clear to me how best to add that condition. We can't add the condition in the inner function of the values: since we want that PRODUCT(..., 0, ...) = 0, we want that EXP(SUM(..., f(0), ...)) = 0, for some f that we choose, but to satisfy this, we need that SUM(..., f(0), ...) = LOG(0) -- again thwarted by the same issue that log(0) is undefined. We need to check for the presence of zero in some other way, e.g. MIN(ABS(a)) = 0. So we'd have SELECT CASE WHEN MIN(ABS(a)) = 0 THEN 0 ELSE EXP(SUM(LOG(a))) END AS product. Is this the kind of thing you were thinking of? – jameshfisher Apr 30 '14 at 17:56
4

In the interests of learning how to fish, I have successfully compiled and installed a "Hello, World!" UDF (user-defined function) for MySQL found here. The hello_world.so file (after being complied with gcc -shared -o hello_world.so -I /usr/include/mysql hello_world.c) should be stored in /usr/lib/mysql/plugins/ with 755 permissions on Ubuntu linux systems. [The "-I /usr/include/mysql" is the path to the mysql header files; I found my code wouldn't compile without this parameter, but YMMV.]

The program does nothing but print out the string "Hello, World!" for each record in the resulting dataset of a query, but that's all it is supposed to do. I will try to write a SMALL aggregate function in the next few days. There is an example of an aggregate function which computes the average cost of a group of price and quantity records; the SMALL function shouldn't be that different from that function in the end.

Hope this helps.

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