[thread] New Table Feature Announcements

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Not sure if this has been split off into another topic, but there are some oddities and some feature requests in the aggregation functionality that would be nice to resolve:

  1. Issue: When aggregating by Average, NULL values are interpreted as 0. While possibly valid if a user intends NULL to be interpreted as 0, but usually NULL is meant to be NULL and calculation of average should ignore these records.
    In other words, average(2, 3, 0, 7) = 12 / 4 = 3 while average(2, 3, NULL and 7) = 12 / 3 = 4.
    Perhaps a switch to allow both options, but if not, defaulting to NULL being not counted as an observation instead of NULL = 0 is more appropriate.

  2. It would be useful to add FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE to the default aggregations. This is especially useful for time series (i.e. when grouped, show the final result of a running total column). MIN/MAX doesn't always work here as a field could be declining or increasing over time and therefore the final value might be either the MIN or MAX (or, frankly, none of the above).

  3. I don't have a specific use case for it, but having the ability to aggregate by MODE may also be useful

  4. I'd really like to enable/disable aggregations by level of grouping. For example, it may make sense to sum a field for the lowest level of grouping, but not across the top level of grouping. If I could hide the aggregation at the top level and leave it on for the lower level when expanded, that would be great.

Thanks!

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