Question

I need to turning the value of a row into column – for example:

SELECT s.section_name, 
       s.section_value 
  FROM tbl_sections s

this outputs :

section_name   section_value
-----------------------------
sectionI       One
sectionII      Two
sectionIII     Three

desired output :

sectionI      sectionII      sectionIII
-----------------------------------------
One           Two            Three

Answer 1

This is probably better done client-side in the programming language of your choice.

You absolutely need to know the section names in advance to turn them into column names.

Updated answer for Oracle 11g (using the new PIVOT operator):

SELECT * FROM 
  (SELECT section_name, section_value FROM tbl_sections)
PIVOT
  MAX(section_value) 
    FOR (section_name) IN ('sectionI', 'sectionII', 'sectionIII')

For older versions, you could do some self-joins:

WITH
  SELECT section_name, section_value FROM tbl_sections
AS 
  data
SELECT
   one.section_value 'sectionI', 
   two.section_value 'sectionII', 
   three.section_value 'sectionIII'
FROM 
   select selection_value from data where section_name = 'sectionI' one
  CROSS JOIN
   select selection_value from data where section_name = 'sectionII' two
  CROSS JOIN
   select selection_value from data where section_name = 'sectionIII' three

or also use the MAX trick and “aggregate”:

SELECT 
   MAX(DECODE(section_name, 'sectionI', section_value, '')) 'sectionI',
   MAX(DECODE(section_name, 'sectionII', section_value, '')) 'sectionII',
   MAX(DECODE(section_name, 'sectionIII', section_value, '')) 'sectionIII'
FROM tbl_sections