Lesson 8: Structuring query results

Attributes can be retrieved from the entities or relations that own them, or retrieved directly.

fetch
$owner: attribute-type;

fetch
$attribute;

Retrieving attributes via the owner returns those attributes grouped into results by owner, and matches those attribute optionally.

Retrieving attributes directly returns one of those attributes per result, and matches those attributes as a required constraint.

Results can be grouped in a general manner using subqueries.

A subquery is constructed by enclosing a Fetch query in a block and placing it inside the fetch clause of a parent query. The block is preceded by a subquery label and : delimiter, and followed by a ; delimiter.

match
# parent query match clause
fetch
# parent query fetch clause
subquery-label: {
    # subquery
};

Variables in a subquery are shared with the parent query. Constraints in the parent query also apply to the subquery, but constraints in the subquery do not apply to the parent query. All subqueries must share at least one variable with the parent query.

Subqueries can be nested to any depth.

When used as subqueries, Get queries are used to perform aggregations. They comprise a match clause, a get clause, and an aggregation modifier.

subquery-label: {
    match
    # match clause
    get;
    # aggregation modifier
};

The aggregation modifiers are count, sum, max, min, mean, median, and std. Except for count, each modifier takes a variable to aggregate over as an argument, which can represent either a numeric attribute or a numeric value.

count;

sum $numeric;

Aggregations are performed over the set of matches returned by the match clause. Those results can be filtered before aggregating using the get clause. The results are filtered for each unique combination of instances of the filter variables.

get $a, $b, $c;

When filtering results, a variable appearing as an argument in the aggregation modifier must also appear in the get clause.

An empty get clause is used to aggregate over all results without filtering.

get;

The results of Fetch queries and subqueries are sorted in ascending order by appending a sort modifier, which takes an attribute variable or value variable as an argument to sort on. Results are instead sorted in descending order by adding the desc keyword.

match
# match clause
fetch
# fetch clause
sort $attribute;

match
# match clause
fetch
# fetch clause
sort $attribute desc;

The results of Fetch queries are paginated using the limit and offset modifiers, which take a literal integer as an argument.

match
# match clause
fetch
# fetch clause
offset 10;
limit 5;

The sort, limit, and offset modifiers can all be used individually or in any combination. When two or more are used together, those present must appear in the following order: sort, offset, limit.