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Aggregator Stage

Options Category

Method. The aggregate stage has two modes of operation: hash and sort. Your choice of mode depends primarily on the number of groupings in the input data set, taking into account the amount of memory available. You typically use hash mode for a relatively small number of groups; generally, fewer than about 1000 groups per megabyte of memory to be used.

When using hash mode, you should hash partition the input data set by one or more of the grouping key columns so that all the records in the same group are in the same partition this happens automatically if (auto) is set in the Partitioning tab). However, hash partitioning is not mandatory, you can use any partitioning method you choose if keeping groups together in a single partition is not important. For example, if you’re summing records in each partition and later you’ll add the sums across all partitions, you don’t need all records in a group to be in the same partition to do this. Note, though, that there will be multiple output records for each group.

If the number of groups is large, which can happen if you specify many grouping keys, or if some grouping keys can take on many values, you would normally use sort mode. However, sort mode requires the input data set to have been partition sorted with all of the grouping keys specified as hashing and sorting keys this happens automatically if (auto) is set in the Partitioning tab). Sorting requires a pregrouping operation: after sorting, all records in a given group in the same partition are consecutive.

The method property is set to hash by default.

You may want to try both modes with your particular data and application to determine which gives the better performance. You may find that when calculating statistics on large numbers of groups, sort mode performs better than hash mode, assuming the input data set can be efficiently sorted before it is passed to group.

Allow Null Outputs. Set this to True to indicate that null is a valid output value when calculating minimum value, maximum value, mean value, standard deviation, standard error, sum, sum of weights, and variance. If False, the null value will have 0 substituted when all input values for the calculation column are null. It is False by default.

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