---
title: Terms
description: Count the number of occurrences for each value in a result set
canonical: https://docs.paradedb.com/documentation/aggregates/bucket/terms
---

<Note>
  If a text or JSON field is in the `GROUP BY` or `ORDER BY` clause, it must use
  the [literal](/documentation/tokenizers/available-tokenizers/literal)
  tokenizer.
</Note>

A terms aggregation counts the number of occurrences for every unique value in a field. For example, the following query
groups the `mock_items` table by `rating`, and calculates the number of items for each unique `rating`.

```sql
SELECT rating, pdb.agg('{"value_count": {"field": "id"}}') FROM mock_items
WHERE id @@@ pdb.all()
GROUP BY rating
LIMIT 10;
```

```ini Expected Response
 rating |       agg
--------+-----------------
      4 | {"value": 16.0}
      5 | {"value": 12.0}
      3 | {"value": 9.0}
      2 | {"value": 3.0}
      1 | {"value": 1.0}
(5 rows)
```

Ordering by the bucketing field is supported:

```sql
SELECT rating, pdb.agg('{"value_count": {"field": "id"}}') FROM mock_items
WHERE id @@@ pdb.all()
GROUP BY rating
ORDER BY rating
LIMIT 10;
```

<Note>Ordering by the aggregate value is not yet supported.</Note>

For performance reasons, we strongly recommend adding a `LIMIT` to the `GROUP BY`. Terms aggregations without a `LIMIT` consume more memory and
are slower to execute. If a query does not have a limit and more than `65000` unique values are found in a field, an error will be returned.