In a one-to-many relationship, what is the best way to write a query to return the many table as a comma separated list along with the primary table. Currently I cursor through the many tables and update the parent. Is there a better method?
Person Table ID FNAME LNAME -- ----- ----- 1 John Doe 2 Mary Jane
Sports
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table ID PersonID Sport -- -------- ----- 1 1 Soccer 2 1 Football 3 2 Baseball
Returns: FNAME LNAME SPORTS ----- ----- ------ John Doe Soccer,Football Mary Jane BaseBall
Looping through the result set, for example by using a cursor, is indeed the best way to produce this type of output. (I'm not sure what you mean by "update the parent" because that would not be advisable in a normalized relational database.)
When you process each row, you have to do "current/previous" logic, to detect a control break -- in your example, to detect a new person. On a control break, you output the previous control, and initialize the current one. There are two "gotchas" in the logic, because you don't have a previous control to compare with the very first row, and also after the last row, you don't have a current control. But this kind of logic is bread-and-butter stuff for competent programmers.
For an easier way to do it, see Denormalizing a result set (11 June 2001) for a similar example using ColdFusion, which does the looping and control break checking for you automatically.
This was first published in September 2002
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