Join 2 sets based on default order - postgresql

Question

How do I join 2 sets of records solely based on the default order?
So if I have a table x(col(1,2,3,4,5,6,7)) and another table z(col(a,b,c,d,e,f,g))
it will return
c1 c2
-- --
1 a
2 b
3 c
4 d
5 e
6 f
7 g
Actually, I wanted to join a pair of one dimensional arrays from parameters and treat them like columns from a table.
Sample code:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "Test"(timestamp without time zone[],
timestamp without time zone[])
RETURNS refcursor AS
$BODY$
DECLARE
curr refcursor;
BEGIN
OPEN curr FOR
SELECT DISTINCT "Start" AS x, "End" AS y, COUNT("A"."id")
FROM UNNEST($1) "Start"
INNER JOIN
(
SELECT "End", ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY ("End")) rn
FROM UNNEST($2) "End" ORDER BY ("End")
) "End" ON ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY ("Start")) = "End".rn
LEFT JOIN "A" ON ("A"."date" BETWEEN x AND y)
GROUP BY 1,2
ORDER BY "Start";
return curr;
END
$BODY$

Answer 1

Now, to answer the real question that was revealed in comments, which appears to be something like:
Given two arrays 'a' and 'b', how do I pair up their elements so I can get the element pairs as column aliases in a query?
There are a couple of ways to tackle this:
If and only if the arrays are of equal length, use multiple unnest functions in the SELECT clause (a deprecated approach that should only be used for backward compatibility);
Use generate_subscripts to loop over the arrays;
Use generate_series over subqueries against array_lower and array_upper to emulate generate_subscripts if you need to support versions too old to have generate_subscripts;
Relying on the order that unnest returns tuples in and hoping - like in my other answer and as shown below. It'll work, but it's not guaranteed to work in future versions.
Use the WITH ORDINALITY functionality added in PostgreSQL 9.4 (see also its first posting) to get a row number for unnest when 9.4 comes out.
Use multiple-array UNNEST, which is SQL-standard but which PostgreSQL doesn't support yet.
So, say we have function arraypair with array parameters a and b:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION arraypair (a integer[], b text[])
RETURNS TABLE (col_a integer, col_b text) AS $$
-- blah code here blah
$$ LANGUAGE whatever IMMUTABLE;
and it's invoked as:
SELECT * FROM arraypair( ARRAY[1,2,3,4,5,6,7], ARRAY['a','b','c','d','e','f','g'] );
possible function definitions would be:
SRF-in-SELECT (deprecated)
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION arraypair (a integer[], b text[])
RETURNS TABLE (col_a integer, col_b text) AS $$
SELECT unnest(a), unnest(b);
$$ LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE;
Will produce bizarre and unexpected results if the arrays aren't equal in length; see the documentation on set returning functions and their non-standard use in the SELECT list to learn why, and what exactly happens.
generate_subscripts
This is likely the safest option:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION arraypair (a integer[], b text[])
RETURNS TABLE (col_a integer, col_b text) AS $$
SELECT
a[i], b[i]
FROM generate_subscripts(CASE WHEN array_length(a,1) >= array_length(b,1) THEN a::text[] ELSE b::text[] END, 1) i;
$$ LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE;
If the arrays are of unequal length, as written it'll return null elements for the shorter, so it works like a full outer join. Reverse the sense of the case to get an inner-join like effect. The function assumes the arrays are one-dimensional and that they start at index 1. If an entire array argument is NULL then the function returns NULL.
A more generalized version would be written in PL/PgSQL and would check array_ndims(a) = 1, check array_lower(a, 1) = 1, test for null arrays, etc. I'll leave that to you.
Hoping for pair-wise returns:
This isn't guaranteed to work, but does with PostgreSQL's current query executor:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION arraypair (a integer[], b text[])
RETURNS TABLE (col_a integer, col_b text) AS $$
WITH
rn_c1(rn, col) AS (
SELECT row_number() OVER (), c1.col
FROM unnest(a) c1(col)
),
rn_c2(rn, col) AS (
SELECT row_number() OVER (), c2.col
FROM unnest(b) c2(col)
)
SELECT
rn_c1.col AS c1,
rn_c2.col AS c2
FROM rn_c1
INNER JOIN rn_c2 ON (rn_c1.rn = rn_c2.rn);
$$ LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE;
I would consider using generate_subscripts much safer.
Multi-argument unnest:
This should work, but doesn't because PostgreSQL's unnest doesn't accept multiple input arrays (yet):
SELECT * FROM unnest(a,b);

Answer 2

select x.c1, z.c2
from
x
inner join
(
select
c2,
row_number() over(order by c2) rn
from z
order by c2
) z on x.c1 = z.rn
order by x.c1
If x.c1 is not 1,2,3... you can do the same that was done with z
The middle order by is not necessary as pointed by Erwin. I tested it like this:
create table t (i integer);
insert into t
select ceil(random() * 100000)
from generate_series(1, 100000);
select
i,
row_number() over(order by i) rn
from t
;
And i comes out ordered. Before this simple test which I never executed I though it would be possible that the rows would be numbered in any order.

Answer 3

By "default order" it sounds like you probably mean the order in which the rows are returned by select * from tablename without an ORDER BY.
If so, this ordering is undefined. The database can return rows in any order that it feels like. You'll find that if you UPDATE a row, it probably moves to a different position in the table.
If you're stuck in a situation where you assumed tables had an order and they don't, you can as a recovery option add a row number based on the on-disk ordering of the tuples within the table:
select row_number() OVER (), *
from the_table
order by ctid
If the output looks right, I recommend that you CREATE TABLE a new table with an extra field, then do an INSERT INTO ... SELECT to insert the data ordered by ctid, then ALTER TABLE ... RENAME the tables and finally fix any foreign key references so they point to the new table.
ctid can be changed by autovacuum, UPDATE, CLUSTER, etc, so it is not something you should ever be using in applications. I'm using it here only because it sounds like you don't have any real ordering or identifier key.
If you need to pair up rows based on their on-disk ordering (an unreliable and unsafe thing to do as noted above), you could per this SQLFiddle try:
WITH
rn_c1(rn, col) AS (
SELECT row_number() OVER (ORDER BY ctid), c1.col
FROM c1
),
rn_c2(rn, col) AS (
SELECT row_number() OVER (ORDER BY ctid), c2.col
FROM c2
)
SELECT
rn_c1.col AS c1,
rn_c2.col AS c2
FROM rn_c1
INNER JOIN rn_c2 ON (rn_c1.rn = rn_c2.rn);
but never rely on this in a production app. If you're really stuck you can use this with CREATE TABLE AS to construct a new table that you can start with when you're working on recovering data from a DB that lacks a required key, but that's about it.
The same approach given above might work with an empty window clause () instead of (ORDER BY ctid) when using sets that lack a ctid, like interim results from functions. It's even less safe then though, and should be a matter of last resort only.
(See also this newer related answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17762282/398670)