Union of two arrays in PostgreSQL without unnesting - arrays

Question

I have two arrays in PostgreSQL that I need to union. For example:
{1,2,3} union {1,4,5} would return {1,2,3,4,5}
Using the concatenate (||) operator would not remove duplicate entries, i.e. it returns {1,2,3,1,4,5}
I found one solution on the web, however I do not like how it needs to unnest both arrays:
select ARRAY(select unnest(ARRAY[1,2,3]) as a UNION select unnest(ARRAY[2,3,4,5]) as a)
Is there an operator or built-in function that will cleanly union two arrays?

Answer 1

If your problem is to unnest twice this will unnest only once
select array_agg(a order by a)
from (
select distinct unnest(array[1,2,3] || array[2,3,4,5]) as a
) s;

Answer 2

There is a extension intarray (in contrib package) that contains some useful functions and operators:
postgres=# create extension intarray ;
CREATE EXTENSION
with single pipe operator:
postgres=# select array[1,2,3] | array[3,4,5];
?column?
─────────────
{1,2,3,4,5}
(1 row)
or with uniq function:
postgres=# select uniq(ARRAY[1,2,3] || ARRAY[3,4,5]);
uniq
─────────────
{1,2,3,4,5}
(1 row)
ANSI/SQL knows a multiset, but it is not supported by PostgreSQL yet.

Answer 3

Can be done like so...
select uniq(sort(array_remove(array_cat(ARRAY[1,2,3], ARRAY[1,4,5]), NULL)))
gives:
{1,2,3,4,5}
array_remove is needed because your can't sort arrays with NULLS.
Sort is needed because uniq de-duplicates only if adjacent elements are found.
A benefit of this approach over #Clodoaldo Neto's is that works entire within the select, and doesn't the unnest in the FROM clause. This makes it straightforward to operate on multiple arrays columns at the same time, and in a single table-scan. (Although see Ryan Guill version as a function in the comment).
Also, this pattern works for all array types (who's elements are sortable).
A downside is that, feasibly, its a little slower for longer arrays (due to the sort and the 3 intermediate array allocations).
I think both this and the accept answer fail if you want to keep NULL in the result.

Answer 4

The intarray-based answers don't work when you're trying to take the set union of an array-valued column from a group of rows. The accepted array_agg-based answer can be modified to work, e.g.
SELECT selector_column, array_agg(a ORDER BY a) AS array_valued_column
FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT selector_column, UNNEST(array_valued_column) AS a FROM table
) _ GROUP BY selector_column;
but, if this is buried deep in a complex query, the planner won't be able to push outer WHERE expressions past it, even when they would substantially reduce the number of rows that have to be processed. The right solution in that case is to define a custom aggregate:
CREATE FUNCTION array_union_step (s ANYARRAY, n ANYARRAY) RETURNS ANYARRAY
AS $$ SELECT s || n; $$
LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE LEAKPROOF PARALLEL SAFE;
CREATE FUNCTION array_union_final (s ANYARRAY) RETURNS ANYARRAY
AS $$
SELECT array_agg(i ORDER BY i) FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT UNNEST(x) AS i FROM (VALUES(s)) AS v(x)
) AS w WHERE i IS NOT NULL;
$$
LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE LEAKPROOF PARALLEL SAFE;
CREATE AGGREGATE array_union (ANYARRAY) (
SFUNC = array_union_step,
STYPE = ANYARRAY,
FINALFUNC = array_union_final,
INITCOND = '{}',
PARALLEL = SAFE
);
Usage is
SELECT selector_column, array_union(array_valued_column) AS array_valued_column
FROM table
GROUP BY selector_column;
It's doing the same thing "under the hood", but because it's packaged into an aggregate function, the planner can see through it.
It's possible that this could be made more efficient by having the step function do the UNNEST and append the rows to a temporary table, rather than a scratch array, but I don't know how to do that and this is good enough for my use case.