Transforming Data
Streaming expressions provides a powerful set of functions for transforming result sets. This section of the user guide provides an overview of useful transformations applied to result sets.
Selecting and Adding Fields
The select
function wraps another streaming expression can perform the following operations on each tuple in the stream:
-
Select a subset of fields
-
Map fields to new names
-
Compute new fields
Below is an example showing the select
function wrapping a search
function and mapping fields to new field names.
The recNum
function is a math expression which simply returns the current record number of the tuple.
The select
expression can call any math expression to compute new values.
Below is an example using the div
function to compute a new field from two existing fields:
Filtering Tuples
The having
function can be used to filter tuples in the stream based on boolean logic.
In the example below the having
function is filtering the output of the facet
function to only emit tuples that have count(*)
greater than 20404.
Paging
The record number, added with the recNum
function, can be filtered on to support paging.
In the example below the and
function with nested lt
and gt
functions are used to select records within a specific record number range:
Handling Nulls
The notNull
and isNull
functions can be used to either replace null values with different values, or to filter out tuples with null values.
The example below is using the isNull
function inside of select
function to replace null values with -1.
The if
function takes 3 parameters.
The first is a boolean expression, in this case isNull
.
The if
function returns the second parameter if the boolean function returns true, and the third parameter if it returns false.
In this case isNull
is always true because its checking for a field in the tuples that is not included in the result set.
notNull
and isNull
can also be used with the having
function to filter out tuples with null values.
The example below emits all the documents because it is evaluating isNull
for a field that is not in the result set, which always returns true.
The example below emits zero documents because it is evaluating notNull
for
a field that is not in the result set, which always returns false.
Regex Matching and Filtering
The matches
function can be used inside of a having
function to test if a field in the record matches a specific regular expression.
This allows for sophisticated regex matching over search results.
The example below uses the matches
function to return all records where the complaint_type_s
field ends with Commercial.
Sorting
The sort
and top
function can be used to resort a result set in memory.
The sort
function sorts and returns the entire result set based on the sort criteria.
The top
function can be used to return the top N values in a result set based on the sort criteria.
Rollups
The rollup
and hashRollup
functions can be used to perform aggregations over result sets.
This is different then the facet
, facet2D
and timeseries
aggregation functions which push the aggregations into the search engine using the JSON facet API.
The rollup
function performs map-reduce style rollups, which requires the result stream be sorted by the grouping fields.
This allows for aggregations over very high cardinality fields.
The hashRollup
function performs rollups keeping all buckets in an in-memory hashmap.
This requires enough memory to store all the distinct group by fields in memory, but does not require that the underlying stream be sorted.
The example below shows a visualization of the top 5 complaint types from a random sample of the nyc311
complaint database.
The top
function is used to select the top 5 complaint types based on the count(*)
field output by the hashRollup
.