blend

compute a blended type of input values

Synopsis

blend(any) -> type

Description

The blend aggregate function applies type fusion to its input and returns the fused type. Unlike fuse, blend does not employ fusion types and therefore it is not possible in general to recover the original input from a blended input.

It is useful with grouped aggregation for data exploration and discovery when searching for shaping rules to cluster a large number of varied input types to a smaller number of fused types each from a set of interrelated types.

Examples

Fuse two records:

# spq
blend(this)
# input
{a:1,b:2}
{a:2,b:"foo"}
# expected output
<{a:int64,b:int64|string}>

Fuse records with a grouping key:

# spq
blend(this) by b | sort
# input
{a:1,b:"bar"}
{a:2.1,b:"foo"}
{a:3,b:"bar"}
# expected output
{b:"bar",blend:<{a:int64,b:string}>}
{b:"foo",blend:<{a:float64,b:string}>}