Transform Row Values to Column Names - sql

Question

I have a table of customer contacts and their role. Simplified example below.
customer | role | userid
----------------------------
1 | Support | 123
1 | Support | 456
1 | Procurement | 567
...
desired output
customer | Support1 | Support2 | Support3 | Support4 | Procurement1 | Procurement2
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | 123 | 456 | null | null | 567 | null
2 | 123 | 456 | 12333 | 45776 | 888 | 56723
So dynamically create number of required columns based on how many user are in that role. It's a small number of roles. Also I can assume max 5 user in that same role. Which means worst case I need to generate 5 columns for each role. The userids don't need to be in any particular order.
My current approach is getting 1 userid per role/customer. Then a second query pulls another id that wasn't part of first results set. And so on. But that way I have to statically create 5 queries. It works. But I was wondering whether there is a more efficient way? Dynamically creating needed columns.
Example of pulling one user per role:
SELECT customer,role,
(SELECT top 1 userid
FROM temp as tmp1
where tmp1.customer=tmp2.customer and tmp1.role=tmp2.role
) as userid
FROM temp as tmp2
group by customer,role
order by customer,role
SQL create with dummy data
create table temp
(
customer int,
role nvarchar(20),
userid int
)
insert into temp values (1,'Support',123)
insert into temp values (1,'Support',456)
insert into temp values (1,'Procurement',567)
insert into temp values (2,'Support',123)
insert into temp values (2,'Support',456)
insert into temp values (2,'Procurement',888)
insert into temp values (2,'Support',12333)
insert into temp values (2,'Support',45776)
insert into temp values (2,'Procurement',56723)

Answer 1

You may need to adapt your approach slightly if you want to avoid getting into the realm of programming user defined table functions (which is what you would need in order to generate columns dynamically). You don't mention which SQL database variant you are using (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, ?). I'm going to make the assumption that it supports some form of string aggregation feature (they pretty much all do), but the syntax for doing this will vary, so you will probably have to adjust the code to your circumstances. You mention that the number of roles is small (5-ish?). The proposed solution is to generate a comma-separated list of user ids, one for each role, using common table expressions (CTEs) and the LISTAGG (variously named STRING_AGG, GROUP_CONCAT, etc. in other databases) function.
WITH tsupport
AS (SELECT customer,
Listagg(userid, ',') AS "Support"
FROM temp
WHERE ROLE = 'Support'
GROUP BY customer),
tprocurement
AS (SELECT customer,
Listagg(userid, ',') AS "Procurement"
FROM temp
WHERE ROLE = 'Procurement'
GROUP BY customer)
--> tnextrole...
--> AS (SELECT ... for additional roles
--> Listagg...
SELECT a.customer,
"Support",
"Procurement"
--> "Next Role" etc.
FROM tsupport a
JOIN tprocurement b
ON a.customer = b.customer
--> JOIN tNextRole ...
Fiddle is here with a result that appears as below based on your dummy data: