In our previous articles we had a look at What is an SQL relation? and What is a SQL JOIN?. Today, I want to show you what is an aggregate in SQL.

You might have heard about Map/Reduce when Google made it famous, or maybe some years before, or maybe some years later. The general processing functions map and reduce where invented a very long time ago. The novelty from the advertising giant was in using them in a heavily distributed programming context.

With map you apply the same processing to every object in a collection. With reduce, you compute a result per collection of object. In SQL we know how to do that too, and we call that an aggregate.