SQL Query to concatenate column values from multiple rows in Oracle

Question

There are a few ways depending on what version you have - see the oracle documentation on string aggregation techniques. A very common one is to use LISTAGG:

SELECT pid, LISTAGG(Desc, ' ') WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY seq) AS description
FROM B GROUP BY pid;

Then join to A to pick out the pids you want.

Note: Out of the box, LISTAGG only works correctly with VARCHAR2 columns.

There's also an XMLAGG function, which works on versions prior to 11.2. Because WM_CONCAT is undocumented and unsupported by Oracle, it's recommended not to use it in production system.

With XMLAGG you can do the following:

SELECT XMLAGG(XMLELEMENT(E,ename||',')).EXTRACT('//text()') "Result" 
FROM employee_names

What this does is

• put the values of the ename column (concatenated with a comma) from the employee_names table in an xml element (with tag E)
• extract the text of this
• aggregate the xml (concatenate it)
• call the resulting column "Result"

With SQL model clause:

SQL> select pid
  2       , ltrim(sentence) sentence
  3    from ( select pid
  4                , seq
  5                , sentence
  6             from b
  7            model
  8                  partition by (pid)
  9                  dimension by (seq)
 10                  measures (descr,cast(null as varchar2(100)) as sentence)
 11                  ( sentence[any] order by seq desc
 12                    = descr[cv()] || ' ' || sentence[cv()+1]
 13                  )
 14         )
 15   where seq = 1
 16  /

P SENTENCE
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Have a nice day
B Nice Work.
C Yes we can do this work!

3 rows selected.

I wrote about this here. And if you follow the link to the OTN-thread you will find some more, including a performance comparison.

The LISTAGG analytic function was introduced in Oracle 11g Release 2, making it very easy to aggregate strings. If you are using 11g Release 2 you should use this function for string aggregation. Please refer below url for more information about string concatenation.

http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/misc/StringAggregationTechniques.php

String Concatenation

As most of the answers suggest, LISTAGG is the obvious option. However, one annoying aspect with LISTAGG is that if the total length of concatenated string exceeds 4000 characters( limit for VARCHAR2 in SQL ), the below error is thrown, which is difficult to manage in Oracle versions upto 12.1

ORA-01489: result of string concatenation is too long

A new feature added in 12cR2 is the ON OVERFLOW clause of LISTAGG. The query including this clause would look like:

SELECT pid, LISTAGG(Desc, ' ' on overflow truncate) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY seq) AS desc
FROM B GROUP BY pid;

The above will restrict the output to 4000 characters but will not throw the ORA-01489 error.

These are some of the additional options of ON OVERFLOW clause:

• ON OVERFLOW TRUNCATE 'Contd..' : This will display 'Contd..' at the end of string (Default is ... )
• ON OVERFLOW TRUNCATE '' : This will display the 4000 characters without any terminating string.
• ON OVERFLOW TRUNCATE WITH COUNT : This will display the total number of characters at the end after the terminating characters. Eg:- '...(5512)'
• ON OVERFLOW ERROR : If you expect the LISTAGG to fail with the ORA-01489 error ( Which is default anyway ).

For those who must solve this problem using Oracle 9i (or earlier), you will probably need to use SYS_CONNECT_BY_PATH, since LISTAGG is not available.

To answer the OP, the following query will display the PID from Table A and concatenate all the DESC columns from Table B:

SELECT pid, SUBSTR (MAX (SYS_CONNECT_BY_PATH (description, ', ')), 3) all_descriptions
FROM (
       SELECT ROW_NUMBER () OVER (PARTITION BY pid ORDER BY pid, seq) rnum, pid, description
       FROM (
              SELECT a.pid, seq, description
              FROM table_a a, table_b b
              WHERE a.pid = b.pid(+)
             )
      )
START WITH rnum = 1
CONNECT BY PRIOR rnum = rnum - 1 AND PRIOR pid = pid
GROUP BY pid
ORDER BY pid;

There may also be instances where keys and values are all contained in one table. The following query can be used where there is no Table A, and only Table B exists:

SELECT pid, SUBSTR (MAX (SYS_CONNECT_BY_PATH (description, ', ')), 3) all_descriptions
FROM (
       SELECT ROW_NUMBER () OVER (PARTITION BY pid ORDER BY pid, seq) rnum, pid, description
       FROM (
              SELECT pid, seq, description
              FROM table_b
             )
      )
START WITH rnum = 1
CONNECT BY PRIOR rnum = rnum - 1 AND PRIOR pid = pid
GROUP BY pid
ORDER BY pid;

All values can be reordered as desired. Individual concatenated descriptions can be reordered in the PARTITION BY clause, and the list of PIDs can be reordered in the final ORDER BY clause.

---

Alternately: there may be times when you want to concatenate all the values from an entire table into one row.

The key idea here is using an artificial value for the group of descriptions to be concatenated.

In the following query, the constant string '1' is used, but any value will work:

SELECT SUBSTR (MAX (SYS_CONNECT_BY_PATH (description, ', ')), 3) all_descriptions
FROM (
       SELECT ROW_NUMBER () OVER (PARTITION BY unique_id ORDER BY pid, seq) rnum, description
       FROM (
              SELECT '1' unique_id, b.pid, b.seq, b.description
              FROM table_b b
             )
      )
START WITH rnum = 1
CONNECT BY PRIOR rnum = rnum - 1;

Individual concatenated descriptions can be reordered in the PARTITION BY clause.

Several other answers on this page have also mentioned this extremely helpful reference: https://oracle-base.com/articles/misc/string-aggregation-techniques

1. LISTAGG delivers the best performance if sorting is a must(00:00:05.85)

   SELECT pid, LISTAGG(Desc, ' ') WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY seq) AS description FROM B GROUP BY pid;

2. COLLECT delivers the best performance if sorting is not needed(00:00:02.90):

   SELECT pid, TO_STRING(CAST(COLLECT(Desc) AS varchar2_ntt)) AS Vals FROM B GROUP BY pid;

3. COLLECT with ordering is bit slower(00:00:07.08):

   SELECT pid, TO_STRING(CAST(COLLECT(Desc ORDER BY Desc) AS varchar2_ntt)) AS Vals FROM B GROUP BY pid;

All other techniques were slower.