Hi Mike, No Excel here. This is a strictly libre systems environment. I believe LibreOffice Calc has a similar tool though. And your suggestion might be a great one.
On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Relyea, Mike <mike.rel...@xerox.com>wrote: > > From: pgsql-sql-ow...@postgresql.org [mailto: > pgsql-sql-ow...@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Don Parris > > Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 8:58 PM > > To: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org > > Subject: [SQL] Summing & Grouping in a Hierarchical Structure > > > > Hi all, > > I posted to this list some time ago about working with a hierarchical > category structure. I had great difficulty with my problem and gave up > for a time. > > I recently returned to it and resolved a big part of it. I have one > step left to go, but at least I have solved this part. > > > > Here is the original thread (or one of them): > > > http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAJ-7yonw4_qDCp-ZNYwEkR2jdLKeL8nfGc+-TLLSW=rmo1v...@mail.gmail.com > > > > > > Here is my recent blog post about how I managed to show my expenses > summed and grouped by a mid-level category: > > http://dcparris.net/2013/02/13/hierarchical-categories-rdbms/ > > > > > > Specifically, I wanted to sum and group expenses according to > categories, not just at the bottom tier, but at higher tiers, so as to show > more summarized information. > > A CEO primarily wants to know the sum total for all the business units, > yet have the ability to drill down to more detailed levels if something is > unusually high or low. > > In my case, I could see the details, but not the summary. Well now I > can summarize by what I refer to as the 2nd-level categories. > > Anyway, I hope this helps someone, as I have come to appreciate - and I > mean really appreciate - the challenge of working with hierarchical > structures in a 2-dimensional RDBMS. > > If anyone sees something I should explain better or in more depth, > please let me know. > > > > Regards, > > Don > > -- > > D.C. Parris, FMP, Linux+, ESL Certificate > > Minister, Security/FM Coordinator, Free Software Advocate > > http://dcparris.net/ > > GPG Key ID: F5E179BE > > My two cents would be to actually use a different tool for the job of > presenting this data. I'd have used a pivot table in Microsoft Excel. Not > sure what your environment or requirements are but pivot tables are widely > used in business, easy to share, can be formatted, and give the user the > ability to drill down and navigate to the data they want to see. > I'd set up a query to pull the raw data you need with all of the > categories and associated data you need. Then bring that data to Excel to > present and summarize it. > > Mike > -- D.C. Parris, FMP, Linux+, ESL Certificate Minister, Security/FM Coordinator, Free Software Advocate http://dcparris.net/ <https://www.xing.com/profile/Don_Parris><http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcparris> GPG Key ID: F5E179BE
