[Monetdb-developers] semantics of aggregation operations

Hi all,

I would like to open a discussion on the semantics of operations.

I just noticed for example that the sum operation will return nil if one or more of the BUNs in the BAT is nil.

That is probably not the semantics that someone would expect, i.e., I would like to see the actual result by ignoring the nils.

Given the current semantics the code that SQL generates has to first remove nils (with a select operation) and then apply the sum operation on a BAT. That costs more time and also results in one more intermediate result.

What about updating the sum implementation to ignore nils? How much would affect that the various projects on top of MonetDB?

Regards, Stratos