I've run into a subtlety around count(*) and join, and a hoping to get some confirmation that I've figured out what's going on correctly. For background, we commonly convert continuous timeline data into discrete bins, such as hours. And since we don't want gaps for bins with no content, we'll use generate_series to synthesize the buckets we want values for. If there's no entry for, say 10AM, fine, we stil get a result. However, I noticed that I'm sometimes getting 1 instead of 0. Here's what I'm trying to confirm:
- The count is 1 if you count the "grid" series, and 0 if you count the data table.
- This only has to do with
count, and no other aggregate.
The code below sets up some sample data to show what I'm talking about:
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS analytics.measurement_table CASCADE;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS analytics.measurement_table (
hour smallint NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL,
measurement smallint NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL
);
INSERT INTO measurement_table (hour, measurement)
VALUES ( 0, 1),
( 1, 1), ( 1, 1),
(10, 2), (10, 3), (10, 5);
Here are the goal results for the query. I'm using 12 hours to keep the example results shorter.
Hour Count sum
0 1 1
1 2 2
2 0 0
3 0 0
4 0 0
5 0 0
6 0 0
7 0 0
8 0 0
9 0 0
10 3 10
11 0 0
12 0 0
This works correctly:
WITH hour_series AS (
select * from generate_series (0,12) AS hour
)
SELECT hour_series.hour,
count(measurement_table.hour) AS frequency,
COALESCE(sum(measurement_table.measurement), 0) AS total
FROM hour_series
LEFT JOIN measurement_table ON (measurement_table.hour = hour_series.hour)
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1
This returns misleading 1's on the match:
WITH hour_series AS (
select * from generate_series (0,12) AS hour
)
SELECT hour_series.hour,
count(*) AS frequency,
COALESCE(sum(measurement_table.measurement), 0) AS total
FROM hour_series
LEFT JOIN measurement_table ON (hour_series.hour = measurement_table.hour)
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1
0 1 1
1 2 2
2 1 0
3 1 0
4 1 0
5 1 0
6 1 0
7 1 0
8 1 0
9 1 0
10 3 10
11 1 0
12 1 0
The only difference between these two examples is the count term:
count(*) -- A result of 1 on no match, and a correct count otherwise.
count(joined to table field) -- 0 on no match, correct count otherwise.
That seems to be it, you've got to make it explicit that you're counting the data table. Otherwise, you get a count of 1 since the series data is matching once. Is this a nuance of joinining, or a nuance of count in Postgres?
Does this impact any other aggrgate? It seems like it sholdn't.
P.S. generate_series is just about the best thing ever.
