SQL Server aggregate operator – Stream Aggregate Part2

Hi Geeks,

I hope you liked yesterday’s blog post on SQL Server Aggregate operator – Stream Aggregate Part1. Today, let us see what happens when we execute any query statement(s) using GROUP BY clause;

USE [AdventureWorks2012]

SELECT Product.Class,COUNT(*)
FROM [Production].[Product]
GROUP BY Product.Class

Stream aggregate operator requires its input to be sorted by GROUP BY clause and in our example Sort operator in the plan will provide data sorted by Product.Class column. Only when data is sorted, the records for the same group will be close to each other and stream aggregate operator can then count records for each group. This behaviour is different from the example used in part1 and reason behind this is, a query without GROUP BY clause considers entire input as a single group.

When we decode query plan in text format, it becomes very easy to understand on the working of this operator;

USE [AdventureWorks2012]

--Step 1
SET SHOWPLAN_TEXT ON

--Step 2
SELECT Product.Class,COUNT(*)
FROM [Production].[Product]
GROUP BY Product.Class

--Step 3
SET SHOWPLAN_TEXT OFF

Above image is self-explanatory and highlighted section says it all. In short, data is sorted by Product.Class column and then Stream Aggregate operator is able to count grouped data sets.

We are going to continue with this operator on tomorrow’s post.

Happy learning.

Regards,

Kanchan

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