Branimir Lambov created CASSANDRA-12417:
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Summary: Built-in AVG aggregate is much less useful than it should
be
Key: CASSANDRA-12417
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-12417
Project: Cassandra
Issue Type: Bug
Components: CQL
Reporter: Branimir Lambov
For fixed-size integer types overflow is all but guaranteed to happen, yielding
incorrect result. While for sum it is somewhat acceptable as the result cannot
fit the type, this is not the case for average.
As the result of average is always within the scope of the source type, failing
to produce it only signifies a bad implementation. Yes, one can solve this by
type-casting, but do we really want to always have to be telling people that
the correct spelling of the average function is {{cast(avg(value as bigint)) as
int)}}, especially if this is so trivial to fix?
Additionally, the straightforward addition we use for floating point versions
is not a good choice numerically for larger numbers of values. We should switch
to a more stable version, e.g. iterative mean using {{avg = avg + (value - avg)
/ count}}.
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