+1 to considering "metric" / PMetric / etc.

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Amit Sela <[email protected]> wrote:

> How about "PMetric" ?
>
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2016, 16:53 Frances Perry <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>>> Perhaps I'm unclear on what an “Aggregator” is. I assumed that a line
>>>> such as the following:
>>>>
>>>> PCollection<KV<String, Double>> meanByName =
>>>> dataPoints.apply(Mean.<String, Double>perKey());
>>>>
>>>> …would be considered an Aggregator, since it applies a mean aggregation
>>>> over a window. Is that correct, with respect to the Beam terminology? If
>>>> not, what would an example of an Aggregator be?
>>>>
>>>
>> Ah, we may have some slightly confusing terminology here.
>>
>> In that code snippet you are using a PTransform (Mean.perKey) to combine
>> a PCollection using the Mean CombineFn
>> <https://github.com/apache/incubator-beam/blob/c199f085473cfcd79014d0a022b5ce3fdd4863ec/sdk/src/main/java/com/google/cloud/dataflow/sdk/transforms/Combine.java#L359>.
>> An Aggregator
>> <https://github.com/apache/incubator-beam/blob/211e76abf9ba34c35ef13cca279cbeefdad7c406/sdk/src/main/java/com/google/cloud/dataflow/sdk/transforms/Aggregator.java#L54>
>> takes a CombineFn and applies it continuously within a DoFn. So it's more
>> analogous to a 'counter'. You can see an example of aggregators in
>> DebuggingWordCount
>> <https://github.com/apache/incubator-beam/blob/master/examples/src/main/java/com/google/cloud/dataflow/examples/DebuggingWordCount.java#L129>
>> .
>>
>> We never really used the term *aggregation *to refer to a general set of
>> PTransforms until we started describing things to the community. But it is
>> a useful word, so we've ended up in a bit of confusing state. Maybe we
>> should consider renaming Aggregator? Something like "metric" might be
>> clearer.
>>
>>

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