I am trying to write a pivot function in MySQL workbench and many of the places I've looked have not been super relevant.
I currently have:
order_ID Part Description Order number
1 103 A 1
2 104 B 1
3 103 A 2
4 105 C 3
5 103 A 4
6 105 C 4
7 107 D 4
I would like to create:
Order Part1 Description Part2 Description Part3 Description
1 103 A 104 B
2 103 A
3 105 C
4 103 A 105 C 107 D
I can keep the primary key in the output, but it is not necessary. The problem I am running into is that many pivot functions involve using distinct parts names to move them; however, I have over 500 parts. I also would like to move the description and the part together so they are next to each other--most pivot functions are not powerful enough to address that.
I did write a macro to do this in Excel, but it must be done in a database because of further analysis in R and I am pulling data from a database and I must automate any changes made to the data. As a result, I DO NOT have a choice in how the data is organized and laid out. Please do not mention normalizing data or other database techniques because I am trying to fix the data and how messy it is, but I DO NOT have a choice in how the data is inputted.
Some resources I used to gain experience with pivoting in MySQL, but I have not been able to get any code to work.
mysql pivoting - how can I fetch data from the same table into different columns?
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MySQL/Pivot_table
http://buysql.com/mysql/14-how-to-automate-pivot-tables.html