LISTAGG

I read this month's edition of Oracle Magazine, skimming over most articles. But I always stop and read Steven Feuerstein's column on PL/SQL intently. His listing 1 this time around made use of something call LISTAGG. It had a weird syntax. I honestly had never heard of it.

Turns out LISTAGG is new in Oracle 11g release 2. It does something called "string aggregation." That is a fancy way of saying concatenating values from multiple rows into one big string. Hmm. Sounds like it could be useful in certain scenarios.

So you give the LISTAGG a MEASURE_COLUMN. That would be the column whose values are getting concatenated into a string.  You also provide an ORDER BY. This will be the order in which the values are put into the concatenated string. You can specify the delimiter which separates values in the concatenated string.

I got to try better to keep up with new stuff from later Oracle releases.