My business system vendor, in their great wisdom, has constructed a table in a difficult to use format. The table hold comments that are input into a text box on a web form, or through a Green Screen application. The input box allows for multiple lines so they store each line of the input in a seperate record with an ID number in the first column, a line number in the second column, and one line of the text field in the third column. The ID number then repeats and the line number increments for each line that was input.

I need to find a way, preferably using SQL to view this data in a more concise form with a single record containing the entire comment with each record containing the ID number in the first column and all of the lines of text concatenated together in the second column.

I have seached in vain for a method to do this but it is difficult to describe to a search engine what I am trying to do. Does anyone have any ideas?

You want to concatenate strings. Search a bit here or on your favorite search engine - you will find lots of material. Basically, you can use recursive queries or the XMLAGG function (DB2-specific) to perform the aggregation.

you want what mysql's GROUP_CONCAT function does trivially

you neglected to mention which DBMS you're using, which is often important when an ANSI SQL solution may be difficult

Sorry, My DBMS is DB2 on OS/400 V5R4

moving thread to DB2 forum

Is an SQL stored procedure an option?
Then you just need to open a cursor (returning the rows in the right order), concat the rows into a local variable, and return that variable.