How SQL GROUP BY Should Have Been Designed – Like Neo4j’s Implicit GROUP BY

Lukas EderMay 7th, 2015Last Updated: May 6th, 2015

2 27 3 minutes read

In the recent past, we’ve explained the syntactic implications of the SQL GROUP BY clause. If you haven’t already, you should read our article “Do You Really Understand SQL’s GROUP BY and HAVING clauses?“.

In essence, adding a GROUP BY clause to your query transforms your query on very implicit levels. The following reminder summarises the previous article:

Only column expressions referenced in the GROUP BY clause, or aggregations of other column expressions may appear in the SELECT clause
Aggregations without explicit GROUP BY clause imply the “grand total” GROUP BY () clause
Some databases (e.g. MySQL, and to some extent: the SQL standard) don’t follow these rules and allow for arbitrary column expressions (or at least functionally dependent column expressions) in the SELECT clause

How SQL GROUP BY should have been designed

There is another way of looking at GROUP BY, and it has been implemented in the equally fascinating, beautiful, and weird Cypher query language (those are good attributes) as supported by the Neo4j graph database. This alternative (yet SQL inspired) query language probably deserves a whole blog post series on its own, but let’s focus on aggregation. Because aggregation is the primary use case for grouping.

(for the record, check out the Neo4j docs about aggregation for details)

A quick wrap-up to understand Cypher:

Consider this simple Cypher query:

MATCH (me:Person)-->(friend:Person)
                 -->(friend_of_friend:Person)
WHERE me.name = 'A'
RETURN count(DISTINCT friend_of_friend), 
       count(friend_of_friend)

Cypher MATCH corresponds to SQL FROM
Cypher WHERE … take an educated guess
Cypher RETURN corresponds to SQL SELECT (and it’s placed in a semantically more useful place)

Furthermore

Cypher

(me:Person)-->(friend:Person)
           -->(friend_of_friend:Person)

corresponds roughly to SQL

Person AS me 
JOIN Person AS friend 
  ON [ implicit equi-join predicate ]
JOIN Person as friend_of_friend
  ON [ implicit equi-join predicate ]

Cypher’s way of writing JOIN is actually extremely useful and could also be applied to SQL. It is only a matter of time until someone will write a Cypher-to-SQL transformer that implements the syntax, at least as syntactic sugar for the equivalent ANSI equi-join notation.

Let’s investigate aggregation in Cypher

Here’s the query again:

MATCH (me:Person)-->(friend:Person)
                 -->(friend_of_friend:Person)
WHERE me.name = 'A'
RETURN count(DISTINCT friend_of_friend), 
       count(friend_of_friend)

So, in SQL terms, this is exactly the same as:

SELECT count(DISTINCT friend_of_friend), 
       count(friend_of_friend)
FROM   [ Persons ... ]
WHERE  me.name = 'A'

In other words, the same implicit grand total GROUP BY () is implied and all values are aggregated into a single row.

The next example from the Neo4j docs is more intriguing. This will count the number of nodes connected to a node n with name = 'A':

MATCH (n { name: 'A' })-->(x)
RETURN n, count(*)

Which is a shorter form for writing:

MATCH (n)-->(x)
WHERE n.name = 'A'
RETURN n, count(*)

This example will also perform aggregation, but this time with an implicit GROUP BY n clause. In SQL, you’d write something like:

SELECT   n.id, count(*)
FROM     n
JOIN     x
  ON     [ implicit equi-join predicate ]
WHERE    n.name = 'A'
GROUP BY n.id

The nice thing in Cypher is that the obvious GROUP BY clause (it can only be GROUP BY n.id) is implied. It doesn’t have to be written explicitly.

Takeaway for SQL

We’ve seen a couple of nice Cypher language features, especially the incredibly nice way to write “JOIN” (or rather graph traversal in Neo4j). But a much more obvious, low-hanging fruit with actual chances to make it into the SQL standard would be to make the SQL GROUP BY clause optional, and dependent on the SELECT clause using the following rules:

If SELECT contains no aggregation functions, there shall be no implied GROUP BY clause
If SELECT contains 1-N aggregation functions, there shall be an implied GROUP BY clause formed from the remaining columns
If SELECT contains only aggregation functions, the “grand total” GROUP BY () shall apply
An explicit GROUP BY clause will always be preferred to any implied GROUP BY clause

If any of you ISO / IEC committee members are reading this, this is on my wish list for a future SQL standard. And please, PostgreSQL. Implement this right away.