How to concatenate strings of a string field in a PostgreSQL 'group by' query?

Question

I am looking for a way to concatenate the strings of a field within a group by query. So for example, I have a table:

ID   COMPANY_ID   EMPLOYEE
1    1               


        

Answer 1

PostgreSQL 9.0 or later:

Recent versions of Postgres (since late 2010) have the string_agg(expression, delimiter) function which will do exactly what the question asked for, even letting you specify the delimiter string:

SELECT company_id, string_agg(employee, ', ')
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;

Postgres 9.0 also added the ability to specify an ORDER BY clause in any aggregate expression; otherwise, the order is undefined. So you can now write:

SELECT company_id, string_agg(employee, ', ' ORDER BY employee)
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;

Or indeed:

SELECT string_agg(actor_name, ', ' ORDER BY first_appearance)

PostgreSQL 8.4 or later:

PostgreSQL 8.4 (in 2009) introduced the aggregate function array_agg(expression) which concatenates the values into an array. Then array_to_string() can be used to give the desired result:

SELECT company_id, array_to_string(array_agg(employee), ', ')
FROM mytable
GROUP BY company_id;

string_agg for pre-8.4 versions:

In case anyone comes across this looking for a compatibilty shim for pre-9.0 databases, it is possible to implement everything in string_agg except the ORDER BY clause.

So with the below definition this should work the same as in a 9.x Postgres DB:

SELECT string_agg(name, '; ') AS semi_colon_separated_names FROM things;

But this will be a syntax error:

SELECT string_agg(name, '; ' ORDER BY name) AS semi_colon_separated_names FROM things;
--> ERROR: syntax error at or near "ORDER"

Tested on PostgreSQL 8.3.

CREATE FUNCTION string_agg_transfn(text, text, text)
    RETURNS text AS 
    $$
        BEGIN
            IF $1 IS NULL THEN
                RETURN $2;
            ELSE
                RETURN $1 || $3 || $2;
            END IF;
        END;
    $$
    LANGUAGE plpgsql IMMUTABLE
COST 1;

CREATE AGGREGATE string_agg(text, text) (
    SFUNC=string_agg_transfn,
    STYPE=text
);

Custom variations (all Postgres versions)

Prior to 9.0, there was no built-in aggregate function to concatenate strings. The simplest custom implementation (suggested by Vajda Gabo in this mailing list post, among many others) is to use the built-in textcat function (which lies behind the || operator):

CREATE AGGREGATE textcat_all(
  basetype    = text,
  sfunc       = textcat,
  stype       = text,
  initcond    = ''
);

Here is the CREATE AGGREGATE documentation.

This simply glues all the strings together, with no separator. In order to get a ", " inserted in between them without having it at the end, you might want to make your own concatenation function and substitute it for the "textcat" above. Here is one I put together and tested on 8.3.12:

CREATE FUNCTION commacat(acc text, instr text) RETURNS text AS $$
  BEGIN
    IF acc IS NULL OR acc = '' THEN
      RETURN instr;
    ELSE
      RETURN acc || ', ' || instr;
    END IF;
  END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

This version will output a comma even if the value in the row is null or empty, so you get output like this:

a, b, c, , e, , g

If you would prefer to remove extra commas to output this:

a, b, c, e, g

Then add an ELSIF check to the function like this:

CREATE FUNCTION commacat_ignore_nulls(acc text, instr text) RETURNS text AS $$
  BEGIN
    IF acc IS NULL OR acc = '' THEN
      RETURN instr;
    ELSIF instr IS NULL OR instr = '' THEN
      RETURN acc;
    ELSE
      RETURN acc || ', ' || instr;
    END IF;
  END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;