Re: Flattening a kind of 'dynamic' table

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:44:45 -0500, Merlin Moncure
<merlin.moncure@rcsonline.com> wrote:
> Alexandre wrote:
> > Here a normal listing of design.product_department_time:
> >  product_id | department_id | req_time
> > ------------+---------------+----------
> >         906 | A             |     3000
> >         906 | C             |     3000
> >         906 | D             |     1935
> >         907 | A             |     1500
> >         907 | C             |     1500
> >         907 | D             |     4575
> >         924 | A             |     6000
> >         924 | C             |     1575
> >  product_id |  a   |  c   |  d
> > ------------+------+------+------
> >         924 | 6000 | 1575 |
> >         907 | 1500 | 1500 | 4575
> >         906 | 3000 | 3000 | 1935
>
> ok, you have a couple of different options here.  The first thing that
> jumps out at me is to use arrays to cheat using arrays.
>   Let's start with the normalized result set.
>
> select product_id, department_id,  sum(req_time) group by product_id,
> department_id
>
> product_id |  department_id    |  sum
> 924           a                   6000
> 924           c                   1575
> 907           a                   1500
> [...]

Hello Merlin,

First of all, thanks for your time. Yes this is exactly what I'm doing
right now (if I understand well your point here). All records in
design.product_department_time are unique for each (product_id,
req_time) combo and 0-null values are not possible. This is the first
listing you have.

In my query I added the sum() and GROUP BY stuff to avoid having such a listing:

 product_id |  a   |  c   |  d
------------+------+------+------
        906 | 3000 |      |
        906 |      | 3000 |
        906 |      |      | 1935
        907 | 1500 |      |
        907 |      | 1500 |
        907 |      |      | 4575
        924 | 6000 |      |
        924 |      | 1575 |

So that for a given product_id I have all the times by departments in
a single row (second listing I posted).

> If you absolutely must have 1 record/product, you can cheat using
> arrays:
>
> select q.product_id,
>        array_accum(q.department_id) as depts,
>        array_accum(q.req_time)      as times
>          from
>        (
>             select product_id, department_id,  sum(req_time) as req_time
> group by product_id, department_id
>        ) q
>         group by q.product_id;
>
> select product_id, array_accum(department_id) sum(req_time) group by
> product_id
>
> product_id |  department_id    |  sum
> 924           {a, c}              {1500, 1575}
>  [...]

I did not used arrays because I didn't think about it, but I don't
know if this is still the most efficient way. My software will have to
work out the data, unless the array expands in good columns. But I'm
not an expert at all. I try to do good DB design, but sometimes this
is more complicated to work with the data.

Here is the table definition if it can help:

design.products (product_id     serial     PRIMARY KEY, ...);
prod.departments (department_id varchar(3) PRIMARY KEY, ...);

design.product_department_time (
product_id          integer     REFERENCES design.products ON DELETE
CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE,
department_id       varchar(3)  REFERENCES prod.departments ON DELETE
CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE,
req_time            integer     NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 CHECK (req_time >= 0),
CONSTRAINT product_department_time_pkey PRIMARY KEY (product_id, department_id)
);

And i also have a jobs table which has one product_id attached to one
job with the required quantity to produce. So I must shouw the user
how much time this will require by departments for each jobs. :) This
is a nice report, but I don't want to kill the database each time the
user want to see it.

Thanks for your contrib so far, this will help me looking for other
ways doing it. I'm always ready to hear more!

Regards.

--
Alexandre Leclerc