Question

What I’m hoping to do is create a string out of a table WITHIN a query so that I may be able to place that string in another query I’m creating. Say, I have this for a table:

index | position   | name
----------------------------------------
1     | member     | John Smith
2     | chair      | Mary Jones
3     | member     | Mary Jones
4     | contact    | Grace Adams
5     | director   | Grace Adams
6     | member     | Grace Adams
7     | treasurer  | Bill McDonnell
8     | vice chair | Bill McDonnell
9     | member     | Ishmael Rodriguez

I’m looking for the result as follows:

name               | positions
----------------------------------------
John Smith         | member
Mary Jones         | chair,member
Grace Adams        | contact,director,member
Bill McDonnell     | treasurer,vice chair
Ishmael Rodriguez  | member

I was hoping I could use some variant of CONCAT_WS() to get my result, like this…

SELECT
a.NAME,
CONCAT_WS(
    ',',
    (
        SELECT
            position
        FROM
            TABLE
        WHERE
            NAME = a.NAME
    )
)AS positions FROM ---------------

Obviously, this isn’t working out for me. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Use GROUP_CONCAT^[docs]

SELECT name, GROUP_CONCAT(position) result
FROM tableName
GROUP BY name
ORDER BY `index`

• SQLFiddle Demo