/*

   Derby - Class org.apache.derby.agg.Aggregator

   Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
   contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
   this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
   The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0
   (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
   the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   limitations under the License.

 */
package org.apache.derby.agg;

import java.io.Serializable;

/**
 * 

 * Behavior of a user-defined Derby aggregator. Aggregates values
 * of type V and returns a result of type R. In addition to the methods
 * in the interface, implementing classes must have a 0-arg public
 * constructor.
 * 
 */
public interface Aggregator>    extends Serializable
{
    /** Initialize the Aggregator */
    public void init();

    /** Accumulate the next scalar value */
    public  void    accumulate( V value );

    /**
     * 

     * For merging another partial result into this Aggregator.
     * This lets the SQL interpreter divide the incoming rows into
     * subsets, aggregating each subset in isolation, and then merging
     * the partial results together. This method can be called when
     * performing a grouped aggregation with a large number of groups.
     * While processing such a query, Derby may write intermediate grouped
     * results to disk. The intermediate results may be retrieved and merged
     * with later results if Derby encounters later rows which belong to groups
     * whose intermediate results have been written to disk. This situation can
     * occur with a query like the following:
     * 
     *
     * 
     * select a, mode( b ) from mode_inputs group by a order by a
     * 
     */
    public  void    merge( A otherAggregator );

    /** Return the result scalar value */
    public  R   terminate();
}