Question

Having an odd problem with a MySQL query, I can’t really figure out how to get the data organized as I wish.

I’m building search-script in PHP, but the database structure isn’t in the way that I would like.

Okay, say that I have three tables (these are completely made up):

EMPLOYES
id      name        city        hired
-------------------------------------------------
1       Jim         0810        2001
2       Stan        6777        2002
3       George      6532        2009

SALARY
id      amount      year
--------------------------------
1       2000        2009
1       2500        2010
1       2800        2011
2       2100        2009
2       2200        2010
2       2500        2011
3       2200        2009
3       2300        2010
3       2800        2011

CONTACT
city    areacode    cityname
-----------------------------
0810    0300        Tampa
6777    0800        Miami
6532    0210        Atlanta 

Now, if I stick to LEFT JOINs etc. I am able to get a result that look like this, where it repeats every row in in the Salary table:

name    cityname    hired   salary
----------------------------------
Jim     Tampa       2001    2000
Jim     Tampa       2001    2500
Jim     Tampa       2001    2800
...

But what I really want is something like this:

name    cityname    hired   2009    2010    2011
------------------------------------------------
Jim     Tampa       2001    2000    2500    2800
...

Any way that I can achieve this with SQL?

Answer 1

SELECT EMPLOYES.*, GROUP_CONCAT(salery) 
FROM EMPLOYES JOIN SALERY USING(id) 
GROUP BY id

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/group-by-functions.html#function_group-concat

But you better do it by hand, not in SQL. When I say “by hand” I mean by writing a program that does that for you. We are all programmers here, aren’t we?