Cannot step through asynchronous iterator manually

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 9:19 AM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 01/30/2016 03:06 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> That actually violates the SQL spec. Some servers will accept it,
>> others won't. (You're not supposed to mix column functions and
>> non-column functions.)
>
> Are you sure?  Wikipedia is not always the most accurate place, but they
> have several clear examples on the SQL page of combining table fields
> with count() listed.  This is straight SQL we're talking about here, not
> a particular implementation or dialect. Maybe there're some subtleties
> at play here.

Here's some info:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5920070/why-cant-you-mix-aggregate-values-and-non-aggregate-values-in-a-single-select

I don't have a good spec handy, but dig around a bit with a few
different engines and you'll find that some fully-compliant engines
disallow this.

>> It also can't cope with 'group by' queries, as
>> it'll count the underlying rows, not the groups. I also suspect it
>> can't handle join queries.
>
> The Wikipedia entry on SQL, which seems to be based in some grounding of
> the spec, shows that count(), joins, and group by are all compatible
> with each other. So I dunno!

Yes, they are - but not with the semantics you're looking for. If you
say something like this:

select count(*), foo from table group by foo

then you get one row for each unique foo, with its own count. It won't
tell you how many rows are in the result.

>> The original approach is still the most general, and IMO the best.
>
> Could be.  On the other hand, letting the DB do it all solves his
> problem without mucking about with async iterators.

Except that it means mucking about with other things :)

ChrisA