Perhaps what this person was referring to was an MSAccess "pivot table".
This is a way of displaying group-able row data as columns. For example,
given the following table:
name | date | hoursworked
---------------------------
fred | nov13 | 4
jane | nov13 | 3
greg | nov13 | 4
fred | nov14 | 2
jane | nov14 | 6
greg | nov14 | 4
a pivot table could output the following data:
fred | jane | greg
----------------
6 | 9 | 8
The possibility of doing this in Postgres was discussed on the mailing list
some time ago (search for "pivot table"). I'm pretty sure there is no easy
way to do this in Postgres. I wrote a sample script to do this for a
particular set of data under MS-SQL. I never could test the script since I
do not have a running installation of MS-SQL. If you would like, I could
forward you the script.
Sorry to go on so long,
David Boerwinkle
----- Original Message -----
From: <j.logsdon@lancaster.ac.uk>
To: <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 3:32 AM
Subject: [GENERAL] Pivotal system
> Hi
>
> As a newbie to SQL and databases, someone has asked me what is a "pivotal
> system". Since in my experience most concepts are common across a number
> of disciplines, just the vocabulary changes, can anyone (i) point me in
> the right direction and (ii) can Postgres be set up to implement such a
> system?
>
> TIA
>
> John
>
>
>