[jira] [Commented] (PHOENIX-418) Support approximate COUNT DISTINCT

["Ethan Wang (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PHOENIX-418?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=16052446#comment-16052446 ] 

Ethan Wang commented on PHOENIX-418:
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Reply to [~pctony]: also in Blink DB, they have similar approximate aggregate feature which they use a sql clause. Example would be:
`select count(id) From table ERROR 0.1 CONFIDENCE 95%

> Support approximate COUNT DISTINCT
> ----------------------------------
>
>                 Key: PHOENIX-418
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PHOENIX-418
>             Project: Phoenix
>          Issue Type: Task
>            Reporter: James Taylor
>            Assignee: maghamravikiran
>              Labels: gsoc2016
>
> Support an "approximation" of count distinct to prevent having to hold on to all distinct values (since this will not scale well when the number of distinct values is huge). The Apache Drill folks have had some interesting discussions on this [here](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-drill-dev/201306.mbox/%3CJIRA.12650169.1369931282407.88049.1370645900553%40arcas%3E). They recommend using  [Welford's method](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_for_calculating_variance_Online_algorithm). I'm open to having a config option that uses exact versus approximate. I don't have experience implementing an approximate implementation, so I'm not sure how much state is required to keep on the server and return to the client (other than realizing it'd be much less that returning all distinct values and their counts).



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