Joining arrays within group by clause
UNION ALL
You could "counter-pivot" with UNION ALL
first:
SELECT name, array_agg(c) AS c_arr
FROM (
SELECT name, id, 1 AS rnk, col1 AS c FROM tbl
UNION ALL
SELECT name, id, 2, col2 FROM tbl
ORDER BY name, id, rnk
) sub
GROUP BY 1;
Adapted to produce the order of values you later requested. The manual:
The aggregate functions
array_agg
,json_agg
,string_agg
, andxmlagg
, as well as similar user-defined aggregate functions, produce meaningfully different result values depending on the order of the input values. This ordering is unspecified by default, but can be controlled by writing anORDER BY
clause within the aggregate call, as shown in Section 4.2.7. Alternatively, supplying the input values from a sorted subquery will usually work.
Bold emphasis mine.
LATERAL
subquery with VALUES
expression
LATERAL
requires Postgres 9.3 or later.
SELECT t.name, array_agg(c) AS c_arr
FROM (SELECT * FROM tbl ORDER BY name, id) t
CROSS JOIN LATERAL (VALUES (t.col1), (t.col2)) v(c)
GROUP BY 1;
Same result. Only needs a single pass over the table.
Custom aggregate function
Or you could create a custom aggregate function like discussed in these related answers:
- Selecting data into a Postgres array
- Is there something like a zip() function in PostgreSQL that combines two arrays?
CREATE AGGREGATE array_agg_mult (anyarray) (
SFUNC = array_cat
, STYPE = anyarray
, INITCOND = '{}'
);
Then you can:
SELECT name, array_agg_mult(ARRAY[col1, col2] ORDER BY id) AS c_arr
FROM tbl
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1;
Or, typically faster, while not standard SQL:
SELECT name, array_agg_mult(ARRAY[col1, col2]) AS c_arr
FROM (SELECT * FROM tbl ORDER BY name, id) t
GROUP BY 1;
The added ORDER BY id
(which can be appended to such aggregate functions) guarantees your desired result:
a | {1,2,3,4}
b | {5,6,7,8}
Or you might be interested in this alternative:
SELECT name, array_agg_mult(ARRAY[ARRAY[col1, col2]] ORDER BY id) AS c_arr
FROM tbl
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1;
Which produces 2-dimensional arrays:
a | {{1,2},{3,4}}
b | {{5,6},{7,8}}
The last one can be replaced (and should be, as it's faster!) with the built-in array_agg()
in Postgres 9.5 or later - with its added capability of aggregating arrays:
SELECT name, array_agg(ARRAY[col1, col2] ORDER BY id) AS c_arr
FROM tbl
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1;
Same result. The manual:
input arrays concatenated into array of one higher dimension (inputs must all have same dimensionality, and cannot be empty or null)
So not exactly the same as our custom aggregate function array_agg_mult()
;