group by first character

Question

I have a problem with a query in Oracle SQL.

I have a first_name column in an employees table. I want to group my records according to the

Answer 1

It almost sounds like you want 26 records returned with A, B, C as the first column and then a second column containing all the employee IDs in a delimited list. If so see question 468990 and/or this Ask Tom link. Something like (untested)

SELECT SUBSTR(first_name,1,1), TO_STRING( CAST( COLLECT( employee_id ) AS ntt_varchar2 ) ) AS empIDs
FROM   employees
GROUP  BY
SUBSTR(first_name,1,1);