Re: order function in aggregate

Michael Toews wrote:
> Now, I would like to group a summary of the strings in "sub", but they 
> must be ordered alphabetically. Here I attempt the SQL:
> 
>   select commacat(sub), grp from aggr_test group by grp;
> 
> However, on my system it will output the "commacat" column as:
> 
>   "one, two, three";"pom pom"
>   "two, three, one";"la la"
> 
> (notice that the items in the first column are ordered differently, 
> since the input values were entered in non-alphabetically)
> 
> This is where I get confused, since in the aggregate function, I have 
> specified `SORTOP="<"`, which according to the documentation 
> (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/sql-createaggregate.html) 
> "must be equivalent to":
> 
>   SELECT sub FROM aggr_test ORDER BY sub USING <; -- LIMIT 1;

That's for things like min()/max() where you only want the first/last 
value of some set. You want all of them.

You could accumulate the values in an array and then sort that with the 
final-func that create aggregate supports.


--   Richard Huxton  Archonet Ltd