I have read the great work that all the list members have done working
with cross tabs (pivot tables) in postgresql. The issue I have not seen
a solution for, but would really like to see, is the ability to return
the results of a dynamic (variable # of columns) cross tab function as a
recordset.
The excellent code contributed by Christoph Haller in the "Generating a
cross tab II (pivot table)" thread was very useful, but it dumps the
results into a view. I need to query like "select * from
create_pivot_report('sales_report2','vendor','product','sales','sum','sales');"
and have the result back as a recordset.
The reason I want to do this is that I have a hierarchical structure of
itemtypes where each itemtype contains an arbitrary number of items, AND
each itemtype has an arbitrary number of attributes. I want to perform
the crosstab on the items with attributes for a given itemtype. The
static code works perfectly fine for a query of an itemtype, BUT the
itemtypes and attributes may change often enough that creating views for
each itemtype will be insufficient.
It seems I can do this from any higher level language, but it drives me
crazy that I can't perform this operation as a function inside of
Postgres...
Thanks for any thoughts you might have...
--
Marc Wrubleski <mlwruble_at_math.ucalgary.ca>
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TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your
joining column's datatypes do not match
