How to select a column whose name is a value in another column in POSTGRESQL? - sql

Question

I know this isn't valid SQL, but I'd like to do something like:
SELECT items.{SELECT items.preferred_column}
To elaborate, to achieve what I'm trying to achieve, I could write a long case when statement:
SELECT
CASE WHEN items.preferred_column = "column_a" THEN items.column_a
CASE WHEN items.preferred_column = "column_b" THEN items.column_b
CASE WHEN items.preferred_column = "column_c" THEN items.column_c
... and so on...
But that seems wrong. I would prefer to write a query that looks at the value of items.preferred_column and loads that column.
Is this possible?
My use case involves an Active Record (the ORM for Rails) query, which limits me. I'm not able to use "INTO" for example.
Doing this without creating a SQL function would preferred, though if it's not possible without creating a SQL function that would be good to know.
Thanks in advance for lending your expertise!

Answer 1

You can try transforming the table rows with row_to_json() and then using json_each(), you can join the resultant "key" field on the preferred_column:
WITH CTE AS (
SELECT
row_to_json(Z.*)::jsonb as rcr,
row_number() over(partition by null order by <whatever comparator clause>) as rn,
Z.*
FROM items Z)
SELECT b.value, a.*
FROM CTE a, jsonb_each(rcr) b, CTE c
WHERE c.rn=a.rn AND b.key = ( c.preferred_column )
Note that this essentially operates as a quasi-pivot, so you'll need to maintain an index (the row_number invocation) to self-join the table when extracting the appropriate key-value pairs from jsonb_each's set-return. Casting to jsonb will be helpful in that the binary form will alphabetize the key-value pairs by key order within the object itself.
If you need to get the resultant value as a text string instead of a json primitive, you can do
b.value #>>'{}'
instead of using jsonb_each_text(), which will preserve any json columns.