Merging rows into one row but into SEPARATE Columns

Question

Hello Gurus,
I have searched alot on OTN and many other places, but no where I could get the solution of how can we merge rows into one row but separate column. For example
Consider the below scenario
"DEPARTMENT", "EMP","NAME","SUBJECT"
"Electronics","1","Sam","LIC"
"Electronics","2","Pam","VLSI"
"Electronics","3","Tom","C"
"Mech","1","Abu","Thermo"
"Mech","4","Lina","Machines"Now, I need the output like
Based on Department as Group By Clause
"DEPARTMENT", "EMP1","NAME1","SUBJECT1","EMP2","NAME2","SUBJECT2","EMP3","NAME3","SUBJECT3"
"Electronics","1","Sam","LIC","2","Pam","VLSI","3","Tom","C"
"Mech","1","Abu","Thermo","4","Lina","Machines"
The row data to be loaded into separate columns. Name of the column is not an issue... can be anythingIn all the forums which I went through I could find them loading into a single column, but not into respective separate columns.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

848265 wrote:
Frank,
I saw your name nearly n number of times, as I went through many forums today... And the link which you have just posted, I went through it today afternoon.
Could you please explain this bit taken from your dynamic pivot post.
SELECT     DISTINCT
     ',     COUNT (CASE WHEN job = '''
||     job
||     ''' '     AS txt1
,     'THEN 1 END)     AS '
||     job
||     '_CNT'     AS txt2
FROM     scott.emp
ORDER BY     txt1;Many Thanks.You only need that when you need column aliases based on the actual data (and you explicitly said you don't need that) or when can't put an upper bound on the number of columns to be displayed. If that doesn't apply to this problem, then don't use any kind of dynamic SQL (like the code above); it makes the job much more difficult, less efficient and less robust.
Here's what the code above is doing.
If you were hard-coding a query that showed the number of people in each job, and you knew that the possible jobs were 'ANALYST', 'CLERK' and 'MANAGER', then you might hard-code a query like this:
SELECT    deptno
,       COUNT (CASE WHEN job = 'ANALYST'  THEN 1 END)     AS analyst
,       COUNT (CASE WHEN job = 'CLERK'    THEN 1 END)     AS clerk
,       COUNT (CASE WHEN job = 'MANAGER'  THEN 1 END)     AS manager
FROM       scott.emp
GROUP BY  deptno
;If the jobs had different names, or if there were not 3 different jobs, then you would have to change the lines in the SELECT clause that start with ", COUNT ( CASE ...".
The code you posted is from an example of dynamic SQL, where you first run a Preliminary Query . (What you posted above is, in fact, the complete preliminary query.) The output of that preliminary query is exactly the variable part of the real query, such as:
,       COUNT (CASE WHEN job = 'ANALYST'  THEN 1 END)     AS analyst
,       COUNT (CASE WHEN job = 'CLERK'    THEN 1 END)     AS clerk
,       COUNT (CASE WHEN job = 'MANAGER'  THEN 1 END)     AS managerYou then use this output as part of your main query. In other words, you can write something today that will generate exacrly as many columns as you need next year, with names from the data as it is next year. How? because you're not writing the full query today. The variable part will be written by the preliminary query when it runs next year.