> > > 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 :) +1 What about (for a 2 dim crosstab anyway) take a table and two column names to group by, and return the following results: an 1-d array with the column names, a 1-d with the rownames, and a 2-d array with the cell values; a function to take these three arrays and make csv readable text would be great; also a function to "explode" the arrays into a table (like an array_accum inverse), but this would take a type or something. Is this what every one means anyway? ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq