interesting SQL puzzle - concatenating column with itself.

From: Nick Fankhauser <nickf(at)ontko(dot)com>
To: pgsql-sql(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: interesting SQL puzzle - concatenating column with itself.
Date: 2005-05-08 18:55:56
Message-ID: 427E60BC.8060701@ontko.com
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Hi- I'm doing a conversion from an older database in which a memo field was handled by storing one line per record and then displaying the related records in order. I want to compress all of the lines into a single text field with one record per memo entry.

So for instance, the old database looks like this:

memo_id | sequence | memo_text
---------------------------------------
666 | 1 | The quick
666 | 2 | red fox
666 | 3 | jumped over
666 | 4 | the lazy brown dog

And my goal is to transform each group of lines into a single record that looks like this:

memo_id | memo_text
----------------------------------------------------------
666 | The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog

Any thoughts on how to do this via sql? I could write a little program to do it, but it seems like there must be a pure-SQL solution that I'm not seeing.

Thanks
-Nick
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Nick Fankhauser

nickf(at)ontko(dot)com Phone 765.935.4283 Fax 765.962.9788
Ray Ontko & Co. - Software Consulting Services
http://www.ontko.com

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