On Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 11:56:08AM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > Joe Conway wrote: > > Erik Jones wrote: > >> See how postgres handles filling the NULLs for you? What you'd > >> really want to do with this would be to define some functions > >> for setting and getting a person's answers to a given question > >> or set of questions so that you could implement some kind of > >> data integrity with regards to question ids and indices into the > >> answers arrays such as in the example above you'd want to prevent > >> an entry at index 7 when there is no entry in the questions > >> table for question_id=7. > > > > It occurs to me that it shouldn't be terribly difficult to make an > > alternate version of crosstab() that returns an array rather than > > tuples (back when crosstab() was first written, Postgres didn't > > support NULL array elements). Is this worth considering for 8.4? > > How about returning generic rows? Is that possible? One hack I've used in the past to get those is serializing the rows: XML, YAML and most recently JSON. > It would be really neat if you didn't have to specify the return > type in the query that invoked the crosstab. It would be handy :) Cheers, David. -- David Fetter <david@xxxxxxxxxx> http://fetter.org/ Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david.fetter@xxxxxxxxx Remember to vote! Consider donating to Postgres: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
