Question

I have a Postgres 9.0 query returning results in a way similar to this:

item;qty
AAAA;2
EEEE;3

What I would like is to transform that into:

AAAA
AAAA
EEEE
EEEE
EEEE

Is there any way I can do that on simple, i.e., without stored procedures, functions, etc?

Answer 1

There’s a function ‘generate_series’ which can be used to generate a table of values. These can be used to repeat a column via joining:

select item 
from data,generate_series(0,1000) 
where generate_series<qty order by item;