It's a common operation in DB to have a need of grouping and concatenating several columns in the output result of the query. For example if you want to get make an report for people based on their country from a table containing both the country and the person:
Example 1
On the left is the table and on the right is the concatenated output:
id |
Name |
Value |
id |
concat |
|
1 |
A |
3 |
1 |
A:3,B:2 |
|
1 |
B |
2 |
2 |
C:6, R2 |
|
2 |
C |
6 |
3 |
F:7 |
|
2 |
R |
2 |
4 |
D:5 |
|
3 |
F |
7 |
|||
4 |
D |
5 |
|||
Example 2
On the left if the table that will be queried and on the right is the ouput result.
id |
Country |
Person |
country |
GROUP_CONCAT(person) |
|
1 |
Austria |
Sue |
Ausria |
Sue, Anie |
|
2 |
Austria |
Anie |
Australia |
John, Brian |
|
3 |
Australia |
John |
UK |
Jim, Tim |
|
4 |
Australia |
Brian |
USA |
David, Mike, Tom |
|
5 |
UK |
Jim |
N. Korea |
Joe, Hue, Rick, Jamy |
|
6 |
UK |
Tim |
Finland |
Kimi |
|
7 |
USA |
David |
|||
8 |
USA |
Mike |
|||
9 |
USA |
Tom |
|||
10 |
N. Korea |
Joe |
|||
11 |
N. Korea |
Hue |
|||
12 |
N. Korea |
Rick |
|||
13 |
N. Korea |
Jamy |
|||
14 |
Finland |
Kimi |
Oracle group concatenate
This is the oracle version of group concatenation by using the LISTAGG function. As you can see from the code below two things has to be given : the grouping column and the concatenating one.
SELECT country,
LISTAGG(person, ', ') WITHIN GROUP (
ORDER BY person) "names"
FROM mytable
GROUP BY country;
MySQL concat and group
The mysql version is much simpler by using function GROUP_CONCAT and the example is self-explantory.
SELECT country, GROUP_CONCAT(person) FROM mytable GROUP BY country
country |
GROUP_CONCAT(person) |
Ausria |
Sue, Anie |
Australia |
John, Brian |
UK |
Jim, Tim |
USA |
David, Mike, Tom |
N. Korea |
Joe, Hue, Rick, Jamy |