Taking data from one column and spread it out into multiple columns

Question

I have a table that I wish to take the multiple values out of one column and stick each into its own column..
The data looks like this:
subscriber id benefit plan
12345 Med
12345 Drg
98765 Med
98765 Drg
I want it to look like:
subscriber_id pc_med
12345
select distinct subscriber_id,
(select grp07_benefit_plan from martin_7265_anoc
where grp07_benefit_plan_type = 'MEDICAL ') pc_med,
(select grp07_benefit_plan from martin_7265_anoc
where grp07_benefit_plan_type = 'DRUG ') pc_drg
from martin_7265_anoc

Answer 1

user12296489 wrote:
I have a table that I wish to take the multiple values out of one column and stick each into its own column..Multiple values in a single column is a violation of relational design. Makes it very difficult to implement data integrity. And there is the inevitable complexity and performance knock when trying to extract distinct values from the single column.
Thus your attempt at fixing it is hopefully a permanent solution and not a a hack trying to make a broken db design to work?
As Daniel said, it is very hard to make any sense of the example you have posted. But this is not the first time here that a poster wants to extract multiple values from a string column - so the basic principles of how to do it, remains the same.
You need to have a means to identify each distinct value. This is usually done by identifying the separator character used between values. Such as a space or a comma.
If the values are fixed length, then you can use sub-strings with explicit positions and lengths to extract the values from the string.
The typical case is the former, which means you need to tokenise (split) the string. There are a number of ways to do this. I posted an example in {message:id=1807978} that shows how to do it via a PL/SQL function. There are numerous other ways, such as using SQL only. If you search for a keywords like "+splitting string+", it should turn up these examples.