elasticsearch/docs/reference/query-languages/esql/_snippets/functions/appendix/count_distinct.md

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Counts are approximate [esql-agg-count-distinct-approximate]

Computing exact counts requires loading values into a set and returning its size. This doesn’t scale when working on high-cardinality sets and/or large values as the required memory usage and the need to communicate those per-shard sets between nodes would utilize too many resources of the cluster.

This COUNT_DISTINCT function is based on the HyperLogLog++ algorithm, which counts based on the hashes of the values with some interesting properties:

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The COUNT_DISTINCT function takes an optional second parameter to configure the precision threshold. The precision_threshold options allows to trade memory for accuracy, and defines a unique count below which counts are expected to be close to accurate. Above this value, counts might become a bit more fuzzy. The maximum supported value is 40000, thresholds above this number will have the same effect as a threshold of 40000. The default value is 3000.