Folks, I have a wierd business case. Annoyingly it has to be written in *portable* SQL92, which means no arrays or custom aggregates. I think it may be impossible to do in SQL which is why I thought I'd give the people on this list a crack at it. Solver gets a free drink/lunch on me if we ever meet at a convention.
The Problem: for each "case" there are from zero to eight "timekeepers" authorized to work on the "case", out of a pool of 150 "timekeepers". This data is stored vertically: authorized_timekeepers: case_id | timekeeper_id 213447 | 047 132113 | 021 132113 | 115 132113 | 106 etc. But, a client's e-billing application wants to see these timekeepers displayed in the following horizontal format: case_id | tk1 | tk2 | tk3 | tk4 | tk5 | tk6 | tk7 | tk8 213447 | 047 | | | | | | | | 132113 | 021 | 115 | 106 | 034 | 109 | 112 | 087 | etc. Order does not matter for timekeepers 1-8. This is a daunting problem because traditional crosstab solutions do not work; timekeepers 1-8 are coming out of a pool of 150. Can it be done? Or are we going to build this with a row-by-row procedural loop? (to reiterate: I'm not allowed to use a custom aggregate or other PostgreSQL "advanced feature") -- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])