Simpler with the aggregate function string_agg()
(Postgres 9.0 or later):
SELECT movie, string_agg(actor, ', ') AS actor_list
FROM tbl
GROUP BY 1;
The 1
in GROUP BY 1
is a positional reference and a shortcut for GROUP BY movie
in this case.
string_agg()
expects data type text
as input. Other types need to be cast explicitly (actor::text
) - unless an implicit cast to text
is defined - which is the case for all other character types (varchar
, character
, "char"
), and some other types.
As isapir commented, you can add an ORDER BY
clause in the aggregate call to get a sorted list - should you need that. Like:
SELECT movie, string_agg(actor, ', ' ORDER BY actor) AS actor_list
FROM tbl
GROUP BY 1;
But it's typically faster to sort rows in a subquery. See: