Articles Cookbook
22 May 2014
Agnieszka Kozubek-Krycuń

DELETE RETURNING clause in PostgreSQL

The standard DELETE statement in SQL returns the number of deleted rows. DELETE FROM external_data; DELETE 10 In PostgreSQL you can make DELETE statement return something else. You can return all rows that have been deleted. DELETE FROM external_data RETURNING *; id | creation_date | user_id | data ----+---------------------------+---------+---------------- 101 | 2014-05-06 13:10:45.09484 | 23 | 'Some text' 102 | 2014-06-10 22:23:12.12045 | 25 | 'Some other text' (2 rows) DELETE 2
Read more
21 May 2014
Agnieszka Kozubek-Krycuń

How to Select the First Row in a Group?

Often you want to select a single row from each GROUP BY group. PostgreSQL has a statement especially for that: SELECT DISTINCT ON. Let's say I want to select one weather report for each location. location time report Ottawa 2014-05-15 8:00 sunny 2014-05-15 11:00 cloudy 2014-05-15 15:00 rainy Warsaw 2014-05-15 8:00 overcast 2014-05-15 11:00 sunny 2014-05-15 15:00 rainy SELECT DISTINCT ON (location) location, time, report FROM weather_reports;
Read more
7 Jan 2014
Agnieszka Kozubek-Krycuń

MySQL's group_concat Equivalents in PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, HSQLDB, and SQLite

The GROUP_CONCAT() function in MySQL MySQL has a very handy function which concatenates strings from a group into one string. For example, let's take a look at the children table with data about parents' and children's names. if (typeof VertabeloEmbededObject === 'undefined') {var VertabeloEmbededObject = "loading";var s=document.createElement("script");s.setAttribute("type","text/javascript");s.setAttribute("src", "https://my.vertabelo.com/js/public-model/v1/api.js");(document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0] || document.documentElement ).appendChild(s);} parent_name child_name John Tom Michael Sylvie John Anna Michael Sophie To get the names of children of each person as a comma-separated string, you use the GROUP_CONCAT() function as follows:
Read more