Aggregating Aggregates Using Nested Table Expressions

Sometimes when you are writing your SQL to access data you come across the need to work with aggregates. Fortunately, SQL offers many simple ways of aggregating data. But what happens when you uncover then need to perform aggregations of aggregates?

What does that mean? Well, consider an example. Let's assume that you  want to compute the average of a sum. This is a reasonably common requirement that comes up frequently in applications that are built around sales amounts. Let's say that we have a table containing sales information, where each sales amount has additional information indicating the salesman, region, district, product, date, etc. 

A common requirement is to produce a report of the average sales by region for a particular period, say the first quarter of 2014. But the data in the table is at a detail level, meaning we have a row for each specific sale.

A novice SQL coder might try to write a query with a function inside a function, like AVG(SUM(SALE_AMT)). Of course, this is invalid SQL syntax. DB2 will not permit the nesting of aggregate functions. But we can use nested table expressions and our knowledge of SQL functions to build the correct query.

Let’s start by creating a query to return the sum of all sales by region for the time period in question. That query should look something like this:

SELECT REGION, SUM(SALE_AMT)

FROM   SALES

WHERE SALE_DATE BETWEEN DATE(‘2014-01-01’)

                AND     DATE(‘2014-03-31’)

GROUP BY REGION;

Now that we have the total sales by region for the period in question, we can embed this query into a nested table expression in another query like so:

SELECT NTE.REGION, AVG(NTE.TOTAL_SALES)

FROM (SELECT REGION, SUM(SALE_AMT)

      FROM   SALES

      WHERE SALE_DATE BETWEEN DATE(‘2014-01-01’)
                      AND     DATE(‘2014-03-31’)
      GROUP BY REGION) AS NTE

GROUP BY NTE.REGION;

And voila! We have aggregated an aggregate, (averaged a sum)...