{"id":1391,"date":"2015-04-14T07:18:13","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T07:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/?p=1391"},"modified":"2015-08-06T12:20:35","modified_gmt":"2015-08-06T12:20:35","slug":"is-it-possible-in-sql-to-return-a-first-row-that-has-attribute-names-and-then-values","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/stack-overflow\/is-it-possible-in-sql-to-return-a-first-row-that-has-attribute-names-and-then-values\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it possible in SQL to return a first row that has attribute names and then values"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"profile<\/a>
\nI’m a big fan of Stack Overflow<\/a> and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%<\/a>).\u00a0In this category (stackoverflow<\/a>)\u00a0of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My question<\/a> was:<\/p>\n

I am wondering if there is a way to write the SQL so that it would return me a result as usual but now, on the first row that would return also the attribute names.<\/p>\n

To explain what I mean:<\/p>\n

say you have a table “test” which has 2 attributes “id” and “name”:<\/p>\n

id name\r\n1  nik\r\n2  tst<\/pre>\n
query:<\/p>\n
SELECT*FROM test;<\/pre>\n
produces:<\/p>\n
1 nik\r\n2 tst<\/pre>\n
but what I want it to return is this:<\/p>\n
id name\r\n1 nik\r\n2 tst<\/pre>\n
Is this possible?<\/p>\n
edit:<\/strong>\u00a0I am using PostreSQL<\/p>\n
\u00a0The answer, by a_horse_with_no_name<\/a>,\u00a0was:<\/p>\n
\n
You cannot return the names and the actual column values in a\u00a0single<\/strong>\u00a0result unless you give up on the real datatypes (which is probably not what you want).<\/p>\n
Your example mixes character data and numeric data in the id column and Postgres will (rightfully) refuse to return such a result set.<\/p>\n
Edit<\/strong>:
\nI tested the “union” solution given e.g. by JNK and it fails (as expected) on Postgres, Oracle and SQL Server precisely because of the non-matching datatypes. MySQL follows it’s usual habits of not throwing errors and simply converts everything to characters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%).\u00a0In this category (stackoverflow)\u00a0of posts I will will be posting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":609,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stack-overflow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1391"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1684,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions\/1684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}