The cross-correlation function (CCF) is commonly employed in the study of AGN, where it is used to probe the structure of the broad line region by line reverberation, to study the continuum emission mechanism by correlating multi-waveband light curves and to seek correlations between the variability and other AGN properties. The z -transformed discrete correlation function (ZDCF) is a method for estimating the CCF of sparse, unevenly sampled light curves. Unlike the commonly used interpolation method, it does not assume that the light curves are smooth and it does provide errors on its estimates.