Exploding information to flatness
Date: 18 Apr 2002 15:37:04 -0700
Message-ID: <97b61782.0204181437.319678bb_at_posting.google.com>
Is there an acceptable way to 'blow' out information into a flat file from tables that are related? In this particular case, I'm trying to move related data from tables to an Excel spreadsheet. Here would be a simplified example:
create table user (
id int primary key,
name varchar(50)
)
create table group (
id int primary key,
name varchar(50)
)
create table member (
user int,
group int,
primary key( user, group )
)
Obviously, 'user' to 'group' is a many-many relationship.
I want to rotate out the groups into 'apparent' attributes for each user row in the spreadsheet. In other words, I want my rows from my select statement to look like this with 4 to n columns:
user.name group[1].name group[2].name group[3].name ...
where group[1], group[2], and group[3] are columns for all the groups that exist, but will have values of NULL for which the user is not a member.
Anyone have experience with this?
Thanks,
Todd
Received on Fri Apr 19 2002 - 00:37:04 CEST