We have a single flat file.
900 distinct groups with multiple members.
The data is written by user ID.
ID, Group
ID, Group
....
We need to transform this into a format like this:
Group, "UserID1, UserID2...UserIDn"
Basically, we need to concatenate the user id's into a single comma separated string quoted at the beginning and end of the string
We were thinking about some sort of pivot but each group could have a variable number of ID's.
Furthermore we are also wondering about the limits of varchar, 6000 user ID's with a comma, each 5 to 12 characters would be a pretty long string.
We would be willing to break up the list and have multiple records for a group each with a subset of user ID's (say two records for the group with 500 user ID's instead of one record with 1000 ID's)
There are 900 distinct groups, and can have anywhere from 1 to 6000+ members.
Our thinking now might be that we create a query transform of all records Group Name, User ID (sorted by Group Name).
Then using a script we might invoke sql to"walk" the table and concate each ID into a string until we encounter a change in group, then write out that string for the group ID - and continue this process until the end of the table.
This seems a little awkward and we are wondering if there is a better approach or some built-in BODS features that might make this easier
Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated,
Thanks,
Jeff Henke