Raven Streams: Aggregations - How the User Sees Them

The major reason for streams is the idea that you don’t really care about each individual item on its own. What you care about a lot more is some sort of aggregation over those values. And sure, you do want to be able to access the values, but you generally don’t.

Let us say that you are a phone company, and you want to use Raven Streams to record all the events that happened, so you can bill on them. Let us imagine that we are interested in just SMS for the moment, so we append each sms to the stream.

Then we are going to write something like:

    from msg in messages
    select new
    {
        Customer = msg.From,
        Count = 1
    }
     
    from result in results
    group result by result.Customer
   into g
   select new
   {
       Customer = g.Key,
       Count = g.Sum(x=>x.Count)
   }

If you ever did RavenDB map/reduce indexes, this should be very familiar to you. However, unlike RavenDB, here we don’t need to handle any pesky updates or deletes. That means that the implementation is much simpler, but I’ll discuss that on my next post.

In the meantime, let us consider what is the result of this would be. It would generate a result, which we would persist and allow you to lookup. One can imagine that you can do this via the customer id, and get the sum total as it is right now.

But you’ll probably want to do additional operations, so we need to consider this as well.

For that matter, imagine the scenario where we want to get the data about SMS, MMS, phone calls, etc. How would you expect that to look like?