Aggregate SOQL Functions in SFDC Pros and Cons

"Aggregate query does not support queryMore(), use LIMIT to restrict the results to a single batch"

I was lately working on some reporting requirement on salesforce which was possible only through visualforce and as soon as i heard the business scenario i was confident enough that my solution will be simplified if i stick to the Aggregate Function in SOQL SFDC.

I knew i had huge data in my org and never thought using Aggregate function will lead me to below error

"Aggregate query does not support queryMore(), use LIMIT to restrict the results to a single batch"

This error motivated me to blog this article and share some experience on when to make use of these aggregate query and when not in apex .

If you are confident that the data in a object  can exceed 20000(approximate figure) rows i would prefer avoid these and instead prefer using loops and making page read only at-least and writing my own logic to sum and count .

The read only attribute gives the power to exceed the no of rows limit from 50000 to 1000000 and this is huge number and what internally salesforce does is ,it  uses queryMore() call to chunk the data that's rendered on to the visualforce page and hence if we use best practices to manage heap and with winter 14.0 removing the limitations on script statements one can still manage to show data even if the object consists of huge data .

Happy coding !