Question

I’d like to get a table which stores students data in long format and the marks they receive for all of their subjects in one query.

This is my table structure:

Table: markdetails

## studid ## ## subjectid ##  ## marks ##
     A1            3                50
     A1            4                60
     A1            5                70
     B1            3                60
     B1            4                80
     C1            5                95

Table: student info

Actual Structure:

## studid ##  ## name ##
      A1          Raam
      B1          Vivek
      c1          Alex

I want the result set to have the following wide format structure as result of the pivotization:

Table: Student Info

## studid ## ## name## ## subjectid_3 ## ## subjectid_4 ## ## subjectid_5 ##
      A1        Raam        50                60                 70
      B1        Vivek       60                80                null
      c1        Alex       null              null                95

How can I accomplish this in SQLite?

Answer 1

First you need to change the current table to a temp table:

alter table student_info rename to student_name

Then, you’ll want to recreate student_info:

create table student_info add column (
    stuid VARCHAR(5) PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(255),
    subjectid_3 INTEGER,
    subjectid_4 INTEGER,
    subjectid_5 INTEGER
)

Then, populate student_info:

insert into student_info
select
    u.stuid,
    u.name,
    s3.marks as subjectid_3,
    s4.marks as subjectid_4,
    s5.marks as subjectid_5
from
    student_temp u
    left outer join markdetails s3 on
        u.stuid = s3.stuid
        and s3.subjectid = 3
    left outer join markdetails s4 on
        u.stuid = s4.stuid
        and s4.subjectid = 4
    left outer join markdetails s5 on
        u.stuid = s5.stuid
        and s5.subjectid = 5

Now, just drop your temp table:

drop table student_temp

And that’s how you can quickly update your table.

SQLite lacks a pivot function, so the best you can do is hard-code some left joins. A left join will bring match any rows in its join conditions and return null for any rows from the first, or left, table that don’t meet the join conditions for the second table.