PostgreSQL - join statement duplicate row data combine to single row [duplicate] - database

Question

I am looking for a way to concatenate the strings of a field within a group by query. So for example, I have a table:
ID COMPANY_ID EMPLOYEE
1 1 Anna
2 1 Bill
3 2 Carol
4 2 Dave
and I wanted to group by company_id to get something like:
COMPANY_ID EMPLOYEE
1 Anna, Bill
2 Carol, Dave
There is a built-in function in mySQL to do this group_concat

Answer 1

PostgreSQL 9.0 or later:
Modern Postgres (since 2010) has the string_agg(expression, delimiter) function which will do exactly what the asker was looking for:
SELECT company_id, string_agg(employee, ', ')
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;
Postgres 9 also added the ability to specify an ORDER BY clause in any aggregate expression; otherwise you have to order all your results or deal with an undefined order. So you can now write:
SELECT company_id, string_agg(employee, ', ' ORDER BY employee)
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;
PostgreSQL 8.4.x:
PostgreSQL 8.4 (in 2009) introduced the aggregate function array_agg(expression) which collects the values in an array. Then array_to_string() can be used to give the desired result:
SELECT company_id, array_to_string(array_agg(employee), ', ')
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;
PostgreSQL 8.3.x and older:
When this question was originally posed, there was no built-in aggregate function to concatenate strings. The simplest custom implementation (suggested by Vajda Gabo in this mailing list post, among many others) is to use the built-in textcat function (which lies behind the || operator):
CREATE AGGREGATE textcat_all(
basetype = text,
sfunc = textcat,
stype = text,
initcond = ''
);
Here is the CREATE AGGREGATE documentation.
This simply glues all the strings together, with no separator. In order to get a ", " inserted in between them without having it at the end, you might want to make your own concatenation function and substitute it for the "textcat" above. Here is one I put together and tested on 8.3.12:
CREATE FUNCTION commacat(acc text, instr text) RETURNS text AS $$
BEGIN
IF acc IS NULL OR acc = '' THEN
RETURN instr;
ELSE
RETURN acc || ', ' || instr;
END IF;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
This version will output a comma even if the value in the row is null or empty, so you get output like this:
a, b, c, , e, , g
If you would prefer to remove extra commas to output this:
a, b, c, e, g
Then add an ELSIF check to the function like this:
CREATE FUNCTION commacat_ignore_nulls(acc text, instr text) RETURNS text AS $$
BEGIN
IF acc IS NULL OR acc = '' THEN
RETURN instr;
ELSIF instr IS NULL OR instr = '' THEN
RETURN acc;
ELSE
RETURN acc || ', ' || instr;
END IF;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Answer 2

How about using Postgres built-in array functions? At least on 8.4 this works out of the box:
SELECT company_id, array_to_string(array_agg(employee), ',')
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;

Answer 3

As from PostgreSQL 9.0 you can use the aggregate function called string_agg. Your new SQL should look something like this: SELECT company_id, string_agg(employee, ', ')
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;

Answer 4

I claim no credit for the answer because I found it after some searching:
What I didn't know is that PostgreSQL allows you to define your own aggregate functions with CREATE AGGREGATE
This post on the PostgreSQL list shows how trivial it is to create a function to do what's required:
CREATE AGGREGATE textcat_all(
basetype = text,
sfunc = textcat,
stype = text,
initcond = ''
);
SELECT company_id, textcat_all(employee || ', ')
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;

Answer 5

As already mentioned, creating your own aggregate function is the right thing to do. Here is my concatenation aggregate function (you can find details in French):
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION concat2(text, text) RETURNS text AS '
SELECT CASE WHEN $1 IS NULL OR $1 = \'\' THEN $2
WHEN $2 IS NULL OR $2 = \'\' THEN $1
ELSE $1 || \' / \' || $2
END;
'
LANGUAGE SQL;
CREATE AGGREGATE concatenate (
sfunc = concat2,
basetype = text,
stype = text,
initcond = ''
);
And then use it as:
SELECT company_id, concatenate(employee) AS employees FROM ...

Answer 6

This latest announcement list snippet might be of interest if you'll be upgrading to 8.4:
Until 8.4 comes out with a
super-effient native one, you can add
the array_accum() function in the
PostgreSQL documentation for rolling
up any column into an array, which can
then be used by application code, or
combined with array_to_string() to
format it as a list:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/xaggr.html
I'd link to the 8.4 development docs but they don't seem to list this feature yet.

Answer 7

Following up on Kev's answer, using the Postgres docs:
First, create an array of the elements, then use the built-in array_to_string function.
CREATE AGGREGATE array_accum (anyelement)
(
sfunc = array_append,
stype = anyarray,
initcond = '{}'
);
select array_to_string(array_accum(name),'|') from table group by id;

Answer 8

Following yet again on the use of a custom aggregate function of string concatenation: you need to remember that the select statement will place rows in any order, so you will need to do a sub select in the from statement with an order by clause, and then an outer select with a group by clause to aggregate the strings, thus:
SELECT custom_aggregate(MY.special_strings)
FROM (SELECT special_strings, grouping_column
FROM a_table
ORDER BY ordering_column) MY
GROUP BY MY.grouping_column

Answer 9

Use STRING_AGG function for PostgreSQL and Google BigQuery SQL:
SELECT company_id, STRING_AGG(employee, ', ')
FROM employees
GROUP BY company_id;

Answer 10

I found this PostgreSQL documentation helpful: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/functions-conditional.html.
In my case, I sought plain SQL to concatenate a field with brackets around it, if the field is not empty.
select itemid,
CASE
itemdescription WHEN '' THEN itemname
ELSE itemname || ' (' || itemdescription || ')'
END
from items;

Answer 11

If you are on Amazon Redshift, where string_agg is not supported, try using listagg.
SELECT company_id, listagg(EMPLOYEE, ', ') as employees
FROM EMPLOYEE_table
GROUP BY company_id;

Answer 12

According to version PostgreSQL 9.0 and above you can use the aggregate function called string_agg. Your new SQL should look something like this:
SELECT company_id, string_agg(employee, ', ')
FROM mytable GROUP BY company_id;

Answer 13

You can also use format function. Which can also implicitly take care of type conversion of text, int, etc by itself.
create or replace function concat_return_row_count(tbl_name text, column_name text, value int)
returns integer as $row_count$
declare
total integer;
begin
EXECUTE format('select count(*) from %s WHERE %s = %s', tbl_name, column_name, value) INTO total;
return total;
end;
$row_count$ language plpgsql;
postgres=# select concat_return_row_count('tbl_name','column_name',2); --2 is the value

Answer 14

I'm using Jetbrains Rider and it was a hassle copying the results from above examples to re-execute because it seemed to wrap it all in JSON. This joins them into a single statement that was easier to run
select string_agg('drop table if exists "' || tablename || '" cascade', ';')
from pg_tables where schemaname != $$pg_catalog$$ and tableName like $$rm_%$$