How can I get the label of each column in a result set to prepend the name if its table?
I want this to happen for queries on single tables as well as joins.
Example:
SELECT first_name, last_name FROM person;
I want the results to be:
| person.first_name | person.last_name |
|-------------------|------------------|
| Wendy | Melvoin |
| Lisa | Coleman |
I could use "AS" to define an alias for each column, but that would be tedious. I want this to happen automatically.
SELECT first_name AS person.first_name, last_name AS person.last_name FROM person;
The reason for my question is that I am using a database driver that does not provide the meta-data informing me the database column from where the result set got its data. I am trying to write generic code to handle the result set.
I would like to know how to do this in SQL generally, or at least in Postgres specifically.
SQLite had such a feature, though I see it is now inexplicably deprecated. SQLite has two pragma settings: full_column_names & short_column_names.
I know this question is a bit old, but perhaps someone will stumble over the answer and it will help them out.
The proper way to do what you're looking for is to create and use a View. Yes, it will be a bit tedious one-time to type out all those new column names as aliases, but if there are a lot of columns here's a trick you can use to leverage the PostgreSQL metadata to write out the text of the view:
select 'CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW people AS SELECT ' ||
(select string_agg(column_name || ' AS person_' || column_name, ', ')
from information_schema.columns
where table_name = 'person'
group by table_name) ||
' FROM person;';
running this yields:
?column?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW people AS SELECT last_name AS person_last_name, first_name AS person_first_name FROM person;
1 record(s) selected [Fetch MetaData: 0/ms] [Fetch Data: 0/ms]
[Executed: 4/21/12 2:05:21 PM EDT ] [Execution: 9/ms]
you can then copy and execute the results and voila:
select * from people;
person_last_name person_first_name
------------------- --------------------
Melvoin Wendy
Coleman Lisa
2 record(s) selected [Fetch MetaData: 1/ms] [Fetch Data: 0/ms]
To get the VIEW
(Daryl's idea) in a single statement use a function or a DO
command with EXECUTE
:
DO
$do$
BEGIN
EXECUTE (
SELECT format(
'CREATE TEMP VIEW people AS SELECT %s FROM %I'
, string_agg(format('%I AS %I', attname, attrelid::regclass || '.' || attname), ', ')
, attrelid::regclass)
FROM pg_attribute
WHERE attrelid = 'person'::regclass -- supply source table name once
AND attnum > 0
AND NOT attisdropped
GROUP BY attrelid
);
END
$do$;
This immediately executes a command of the form:
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW people AS
SELECT person_id AS "person.person_id"
, first_name AS "person.first_name"
, last_name AS "person.last_name"
FROM person;
Would be less hassle to concatenate legal column names with '_' instead of '.'. But you need to be prepared for non-standard names that require double-quoting (and defend against possible SQL injection) anyway.
You can optionally provide a schema-qualified table name (myschema.person
). The schema-name is prefixed in column names automatically if it is outside the current search_path
.
For repeated use, you wrap this into a plpgsql function and make the table name a text
parameter. All text-to-code conversion is sanitized here to prevent SQL injection. Example with more information here:
- Table name as a PostgreSQL function parameter
And you might use the new to_regclass()
in Postgres 9.4+:
- How to check if a table exists in a given schema