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Grouping and Reductions

Grouping and reducing operations using aggregations can be extremely powerful.

What Is a Group#

A group is simply a group of like records in Redis.

e.g.

{
    "Name":"Susan",
    "Department":"Sales",
    "Sales":600000
}

{
    "Name":"Tom",
    "Department":"Sales",
    "Sales":500000
}

If grouped together by Department would be one group. When grouped by Name, they would be two groups.

Reductions#

What makes groups so useful in Redis Aggregations is that you can run reductions on them to aggregate items within the group. For example, you can calculate summary statistics on numeric fields, retrieve random samples, distinct counts, approximate distinct counts of any aggregatable field in the set.

Using Groups and Reductions with Redis OM .NET#

You can run reductions against an RedisAggregationSet either with or without a group. If you run a reduction without a group, the result of the reduction will materialize immediately as the desired type. If you run a reduction against a group, the results will materialize when they are enumerated.

Reductions without a Group#

If you wanted to calculate a reduction on all the records indexed by Redis in the collection, you would simply call the reduction on the RedisAggregationSet

var sumSales = employeeAggregations.Sum(x=>x.RecordShell.Sales);
Console.WriteLine($"The sum of sales for all employees was {sumSales}");

Reductions with a Group#

If you want to build a group to run reductions on, e.g. you wanted to calculate the average sales in a department, you would use a GroupBy predicate to specify which field or fields to group by. If you want to group by 1 field, your lambda function for the group by will yield just the field you want to group by. If you want to group by multiple fields, new up an anonymous type in line:

var oneFieldGroup = employeeAggregations.GroupBy(x=>x.RecordShell.Department);

var multiFieldGroup = employeeAggregations.GroupBy(x=>new {x.RecordShell.Department, x.RecordShell.WorkLoc});

From here you can run reductions on your groups. To run a Reduction, execute a reduction function. When the collection materializes the AggregationResult<T> will have the reduction stored in a formatted string which is the PropertyName_COMMAND_POSTFIX, see supported operations table below for postfixes. If you wanted to calculate the sum of the sales of all the departments you could:

var departments = employeeAggregations.GroupBy(x=>x.RecordShell.Department).Sum(x=>x.RecordShell.Sales);
foreach(var department in departments)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"The {department[nameof(Employee.Department)]} department sold {department["Sales_SUM"]}");
}

Closing Groups#

When you invoke a GroupBy the type of return type changes from RedisAggregationSet to a GroupedAggregationSet. In some instances you may need to close a group out and use its results further down the pipeline. To do this, all you need to do is call CloseGroup on the GroupedAggregationSet - that will end the group predicates and allow you to use the results further down the pipeline.

Last updated on Feb 19, 2024
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