Why are stats functions first() and latest() not returning the same result?

[afieffe]

Hello,

I am a little bit confused by the functions latest() and earliest().
Running this search:

index=myindex sourcetype=mysourcetype | stats first(myfield) latest(myfield) earliest(myfield) last(myfield) by sourcetype

Gives us

    first(myfield)      latest(myfield) earliest(myfield) last(myfield) 
    1434767753.755  1434767758.840  1383228859.223  1383228859.223

It is, from my point of view, normal to have the same value returned by earliest() and last(), as we did not change the order of the events. I am surprised to receive different values for first() and latest().

If we run:

index=myindex sourcetype=mysourcetype | head 1 | table myfield

We get:

myfield
1434767758.840

The value returned by latest() seems to be correct. What is returned by first()?

Regards

PS - We are running on Splunk Enterprise 6.2.3

[martin_mueller]

first() gives you the value first seen by the reporting command, with no regard for the timestamp. Depending on what's returned first to the search head from the indexers this may or may not match with latest().