Question

I don’t know if this is possible or not.
I have Table1 with the following fields.

No

A
B
C
D

I want table2's column names to be table1’s row names (varchar(20) each, all null’s)

A B C D

If I add a row in table1, table2 column should get appended too.

Any suggestions.

Answer 1

There’s some info on a few pseudo solutions in T-SQL (SQL Server) here, some of which may be transferable to MySQL: http://sqlserveradvisor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/sql-server-convert-rows-to-columns.html
However there’s no simple method.

The best I could come up with (again in T-SQL) is this dynamic SQL solution:

    declare @tempTable table (ColumnName nvarchar(10))
    declare @sql nvarchar(max) 
    insert @tempTable
    select 'Col1'
    union select 'Col2'
    union select 'Col3'
    select @sql = isnull(@sql+ ',','') + '1 ' + quotename(ColumnName)
    from @tempTable
    set @sql = 'select ' + @sql
    exec(@sql)

–EDIT–

I’ve managed to try out a script on MySQL (via the online host here: http://headfirstlabs.com/sql_hands_on/hf01.htm). The below code works with the demo database there, so should work on your table. I made it slightly overcomplicated by having the columns contain data with the column number because I got a bit confused, but hopefully it’s all helpful so I’ve left it in for now.

set @test:='select';
set @i:=1;
select @test:=concat(@test, ' ',case when @i>1 then ',' else '' end, ' ''Col', @i, ''' as ', last_name) , @i:=@i+1 from my_contacts;
select @test;
PREPARE stmt1 FROM @test;
execute stmt1;

(simplified MySQL Version)

set @sql:='select';
select @sql:=concat(@sql, case when @sql>'select' then ', ' else ' ' end, '0 as ', last_name) from my_contacts;
select @sql;
PREPARE stmt1 FROM @sql;
execute stmt1;

Hope that helps.