Question

I don’t consider myself a complete SQL novice, but I have been staring at this problem for two days now, on and off, and I am beginning to think maybe I am!

Using the following two tables:

ID    Category
1     Animal
2     Color
3     Sport

Name    ID    Value
Fred    1     Cat
Fred    2     Blue
Fred    3     Football
Sally   1     Dog
Sally   3     Jogging
James   2     Green
Anne    3     Swimming

I have been unable to find any combination of group by, sub-query, union, cte or pivot commands that will merge the multiple rows returned from an ‘(ID = 1 or ID = 2)’ query into a distinct rows with multiple columns.

E.G.:

where (ID=1 or ID=2)

Name     Animal    Color
Fred     Cat       Blue
Sally    Dog       NULL
James    NULL      Green

Can anyone please advise me if there is an efficient SQL solution to this or am I wasting my time on something that should be handled by code in the report?

Thanks

Answer 1

Here goes the PIVOT syntax

SELECT Name,[1] as Animal, [2] as Color
FROM
(SELECT Name,Id,Value
    FROM Table) AS SourceTable
PIVOT
(
MIN(Value)
FOR Id IN ([1], [2])
) AS PivotTable;