Question

Does Oracle have its own implementation of SQL Server stuff function?

Stuff allows you to receive one value from a multi row select. Consider my situation below

 ID   HOUSE_REF   PERSON
 1      A         Dave
 2      A         John
 3      B         Bob

I would like to write a select statement, but I want the PERSON names to be in a single row.

For example, when I select from this table, I want to achieve the following

HOUSE_REF   PERSONS
A           Dave, John
B           Bob

I haven’t been able to find a simple solution so far, it may be a case of writing my own function to use, but I’m not entirely sure of how to approach this, any ideas?

The main business use of this, will be to have a select statement that shows each house, and against that house to have one column which lists everyone that lives in that house. The house ref in this select must be unique, hence needing to concatenate the persons

Thanks

Answer 1

You can write a custom aggregate function to do this. This string you generate is limited to 4k characters.

http://www.sqlsnippets.com/en/topic-11591.html

There is an undocumented, unsupported function WMSYS.WM_CONCAT to do the same thing.

http://www.psoug.org/reference/undocumented.html