neo4j: Handling SUM's scientific notation
In some of the recent work I’ve been doing with neo4j the queries I’ve written have been summing up the values from multiple nodes and after a certain number is reached the value returned used scientific notation.
For example in a cypher query like this:
START category = node:categories('category_id:1')
MATCH p = category-[:has_child*1..5]->subCategory-[:has_product]->product-[:sold]->sales
RETURN EXTRACT(n in NODES(p) : n.category_id?),subCategory.category_id, SUM(sales.sales)
I might get a result set like this:
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| EXTRACT(n in NODES(p) : n.category_id?) | subCategory.category_id | SUM(sales.sales) |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ["246","254","255","3279",<null>,<null>] | "3279" | 3.07213e07 |
| ["246","3649","3650","4362",<null>,<null>] | "4362" | 1.023412e06 |
| ["246","287","291","308",<null>,<null>] | "308" | 504712.5999448135 |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
I wanted to be able to add the first two rows together but still have them return separately which meant I needed to convert the values into decimal notation in order to do so.
I came across a Stack Overflow thread explaining how to do it in Ruby:
> "%f" % "3.07213e07"
=> "30721300.000000"
or
> "3.07213e07".to_f
=> 30721300.0
If we want to do the same thing in Java it’d read like this:
double d = Double.parseDouble("3.07213e07");
NumberFormat formatter = new DecimalFormat("###.#####");
String f = formatter.format(d);
System.out.println(f);
// returns 30721300
I couldn’t see a way to make the SUM function return in decimal notation but it’d be neat if there was a way to.
For now we have to apply some formatting on the result if we want to do any calculations with it.
About the author
I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.