Concatenation through SQL

Hi,

Here is small reduced test database:

------------------------------
CREATE TABLE appointments
( id integer, name varchar(32), CONSTRAINT appointments_pkey PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

CREATE TABLE employees
( id integer, appointment_id integer, name varchar(32), CONSTRAINT employees_pkey PRIMARY KEY (id), CONSTRAINT
appointments_employees_fkeyFOREIGN KEY (appointment_id) 
REFERENCES appointments (id)
);

INSERT INTO appointments VALUES (1, 'app1');
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (1, 1, 'emp1');
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (2, 1, 'emp2');
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (3, 1, 'emp3');

INSERT INTO appointments VALUES (2, 'app2');
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (4, 2, 'emp1');
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (5, 2, 'emp4');
------------------------------


I'm trying to write an SQL query that would return this:

---------------------------------------------------
appointment    count_employees    employees
---------------------------------------------------
app1           3                  emp1, emp2, emp3
app2           2                  emp1, emp4,
---------------------------------------------------

First part is easy to write:

------------------------------
SELECT
appointments.name AS appointment,
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM employees AS e where e.appointment_id =
appointments.id) AS num_employees
FROM appointments
------------------------------

... But concatenating employees name is harder, at least for me...

I'm convinced this can be done with Set Returning Functions and a bit of
plpgsql, but I was wondering if it would possible to write some kind of
extension to Postgresql (operator?) that would allow this kind of
syntax:

------------------------------
SELECT
appointments.name AS appointment,
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM employees AS e where e.appointment_id =
appointments.id) AS num_employees
(SELECT CONCAT(name, ', ') FROM employees AS e where e.appointment_id =
appointments.id) AS employees
FROM appointments
------------------------------

... where CONCAT suggest we want to concatenate the variable inside,
with the separator ', ' inbetween.

Thanks for your tips!


Philippe Lang