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A Framework for the Investigation of Aggregate Functions in Database Queries

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Database Theory — ICDT’99 (ICDT 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1540))

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Abstract

In this paper we present a new approach for studying aggregations in the context of database query languages. Starting from a broad definition of aggregate function, we address our investigation from two different perspectives. We first propose a declarative notion of uniform aggregate function that refers to a family of scalar functions uniformly constructed over a vocabulary of basic operators by a bounded Turing Machine. This notion yields an effective tool to study the effect of the embedding of a class of built-in aggregate functions in a query language. All the aggregate functions most used in practice are included in this classification. We then present an operational notion of aggregate function, by considering a high-order folding constructor, based on structural recursion, devoted to compute numeric aggregations over complex values. We show that numeric folding over a given vocabulary is sometimes not able to compute, by itself, the whole class of uniform aggregate function over the same vocabulary. It turns out however that this limitation can be partially remedied by the restructuring capabilities of a query language.

This work was partially supported by CNR and by MURST.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica e Automazione, Università di Roma Tre Via della Vasca Navale, 79 — I-00146, Roma, Italy

    Luca Cabibbo & Riccardo Torlone

Authors
  1. Luca Cabibbo
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  2. Riccardo Torlone
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, The Hebrew University, Givat-Ram, Jerusalem, 91940, Israel

    Catriel Beeri

  2. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6389, USA

    Peter Buneman

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cabibbo, L., Torlone, R. (1999). A Framework for the Investigation of Aggregate Functions in Database Queries. In: Beeri, C., Buneman, P. (eds) Database Theory — ICDT’99. ICDT 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1540. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49257-7_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49257-7_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65452-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49257-3

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