How do I create a user-defined aggregate function?

I need an aggregate function that MySQL doesn't provide.

I would like it to be in MySQL's flavor of SQL (that is, not in C).

How do I do this? What I'm stuck on is creating an aggregate function -- the docs don't seem to mention how this is done.

Examples of desired usage of a product function:

mysql> select product(col) as a from `table`;
+------+
| a    |
+------+
|  144 |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select col, product(col) as a from `table` group by col;
+-----+------+
| col | a    |
+-----+------+
|   6 |   36 |
|   4 |    4 |
+-----+------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

I don't know if there is way to define a new aggregate function, not without messing with MySQL source code.

But if your numbers are all positive, you may well derive from the arithmetic identity:

log( product( Ai ) ) = sum( log( Ai ) )

that you can use EXP(SUM(LOG(x))) to calculate PRODUCT(x). Test in SQL-Fiddle:

SELECT EXP(SUM(LOG(a))) AS product
FROM t ;

SELECT col, EXP(SUM(LOG(a))) AS product
FROM t 
GROUP BY col ;

When the data can have 0s, it gets a bit more complicated:

SELECT (NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM t WHERE a = 0)) 
       * EXP(SUM(LOG(a))) AS p
FROM t 
WHERE a > 0 ;

SELECT d.col, 
       (NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM t AS ti WHERE ti.col = d.col AND ti.a = 0)) 
       * COALESCE(EXP(SUM(LOG(t.a))),1)  AS p
FROM 
    ( SELECT DISTINCT col
      FROM t
    ) AS d
  LEFT JOIN
    t  ON  t.col = d.col
       AND t.a > 0
GROUP BY d.col ;

Tested at SQL-Fiddle

For other DBMS, that do not have MySQL's auto-conversion of boolean values to integers, the

(NOT EXISTS (SELECT ...))

should be replaced with:

(CASE WHEN EXISTS (SELECT 1...) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END)

Specifically for Oracle, a few more changes will be needed, without changing the logic of the answer, only because Oracle does not follow strict ANSI standard in some areas. Tested at SQL-Fiddle-2

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#17267, answer score: 11