IMPROVED METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PARALLEL PROCESSING AGGREGATES USING INTERMEDIATE AGGREGATE VALUES

The present invention performs parallel processing of aggregate functions in a computing system. Partitioned into multiple subsets of data and each of the multiple subsets of data is allocated to one of a plurality of processes. Intermediate aggregations are performed in parallel by the plurality of processes on each of the multiple subsets of data. Each intermediate aggregation yields at least one intermediate value, wherein the at least one intermediate value is represented in an internal type format. The intermediate values from each of the intermediate aggregations are merged into a final aggregation value.