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From: Jeff Sidell <jsidell@postgres.Berkeley.EDU>
To: Joe Hellerstein <jmh@cs.berkeley.edu>
Cc: POSTGRES database manager <postgres@postgres.Berkeley.EDU>
Subject: Re: b-tree bug?
Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 11:16:15 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <199605011816.LAA01344@parkcity.CS.Berkeley.EDU> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960501171507.0091ee60@postgres.berkeley.edu>

> 
> Well, last time I checked, postgres officially assigned no semantics to
> duplicates, so it's *just* possible that everything officially is working
> "right" in your example, because postgres aggregates are semantically
> meaningless in the face of duplicates.  But that's probably not what's going on.
> 

I'm not sure what the official semantics for aggregates/aggregates-over-
duplicates are, but unless I'm missing something, there's a bug:
The aggregate node takes tuples passed in to it from the subplan
and calls the appropriate function for each such tuple.  Count() simply
adds one to a running count.  The fact that we're getting different
counts for an underlying index scan and a sequential scan indicates
that they are retrieving different numbers of tuples. 

Semantically, "select count(*) from LINEITEM where L_SHIPDATE >= D1
and L_SHIPDATE < D2" means "Tell me how many tuples in the LINEITEM
table have a shipdate D such that D1 <= D <= D2".  Not "how many
*unique* tuples" or "how many tuples with unique shipdates".

Jeff

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