Question

I guess this query is a little basic and I should know more about SQL but haven’t done much with joins yet which I guess is the solution here.

What I have is a table of people and a table of job roles they hold. A person can have multiple jobs and I wish to have one set of results with a row per person containing their details and their job roles.

Two example tables (people and job_roles) are below so you can understand the question easier.

People

 id |  name  |    email_address   |  phone_number
 1  |  paul  |  [e-mail]  |  123456
 2  |   bob  |  [e-mail]   |  567891
 3  |  bart  |  [e-mail]  |  987561

job_roles

 id  |  person_id  |     job_title   | department
  1  |      1      |     secretary   |    hr
  2  |      1      |     assistant   |   media
  3  |      2      |      manager    |    IT
  4  |      3      |  finance clerk  |  finance
  4  |      3      |      manager    |    IT

so that I can output each person and their roles like such

Name: paul
Email Address: [e-mail]
Phone: 123456
Job Roles: 
Secretary for HR department
Assistant for media department
_______
Name: bob
Email address: [e-mail]
Phone: 567891
Job roles:
Manager for IT department

So how would I get each persons information (from the people table) along with their job details (from the job_roles table) to output like the example above. I guess it would be some kind of way of merging their jobs and their relevant departments into a jobs column that can be split up for output, but maybe there is a better way and what would the sql look like?

Thanks

Paul

PS it would be a mySQL database if that makes any difference

Answer 1

RE:

I was hoping SQL could do something
clever and join the rows together
nicely so I had essentially a jobs
column with that persons jobs in it.

You can get fairly close with

SELECT  p.id, p.name, p.email_address, p.phone_number,
group_concat(concat(job_title, ' for ', department, ' department')  SEPARATOR '\n') AS JobRoles
FROM People AS p 
    INNER JOIN job_roles AS r ON p.id = r.person_id
GROUP BY p.id, p.name, p.email_address, p.phone_number
 ORDER BY p.name;