Message-ID: <20030402024211.52087.qmail@web12702.mail.yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 18:42:11 -0800 (PST)
From: chester c young <chestercyoung@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Rows as Columns
To: James Taylor <jtx@hatesville.com>
Cc: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
In-Reply-To: <002801c2f8ad$4888c9f0$4500a8c0@theplague>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

This is obtuse, but it would work:  Have a function that would
dynamically build a view that has each of your type names as a column
name.  It could be triggered by any changes to the types table.  The
data table would be a left joined onto the customer table for each
column.  Then select from the view as you would any other view.

If you'd like some suggestions on the procedure, let me know.

--- James Taylor <jtx@hatesville.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone, I just joined this list a few days ago...
> 
> Now, I have a question, and I'm not even sure if this is possible
> without having to make numerous statements.
> 
> Say I have two tables with the following columns and this data:
> 
> types:
> id   | name
> -----------------
> 1    | first_name
> 2    | last_name
> 3    | phone_number
> 
> data:
> id   | data     | t_key | cust_id
> ---------------------------------
> 1    | Sam      | 1     | 1
> 2    | Smith    | 2     | 1
> 3    | 555-1212 | 3     | 1
> 4    | John     | 1     | 2
> 
> 
> Types basically describes what the column type is.  t_key references
> the
> type, cust_id is the user id.
> 
> i'd want to do something like "select t.name, d.data from types t,
> data
> d where d.cust_id = 1"
> 
> This would return something like:
> 
> name         | data
> ------------------------
> first_name   | Sam
> last_name    | Smith
> phone_number | 555-1212
> 
> 
> Well, I need it to somehow return that data in this format:
> 
> first_name   | last_name  | phone_number
> ----------------------------------------
> Sam          | Smith      | 555-1212
> 
> The information in Types is not static, so I can't declare the col
> names based on what you see here.
> 
> Any suggestions on this one?


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