Controlling the Correctness of Aggregation Operations During Sessions of Interactive Analytic Queries

Abstract

We present a comprehensive set of conditions and rules to control the correctness of aggregation queries within an interactive data analysis session. The goal is to extend self-service data preparation and BI tools to automatically detect semantically incorrect aggregate queries on analytic tables and views built by using the common analytic operations including filter, project, join, aggregate, union, difference, and pivot. We introduce aggregable properties to describe for any attribute of an analytic table, which aggregation functions correctly aggregate the attribute along which sets of dimension attributes. These properties can also be used to formally identify attributes which are summarizable with respect to some aggregation function along a given set of dimension attributes. This is particularly helpful to detect incorrect aggregations of measures obtained through the use of non-distributive aggregation functions like average and count. We extend the notion of summarizability by introducing a new generalized summarizability condition to control the aggregation of attributes after any analytic operation. Finally, we define propagation rules which transform aggregable properties of the query input tables into new aggregable properties for the result tables, preserving summarizability and generalized summarizability.