Dynamic query based on second table - sqlite

Question

I have a table of price quotes for multiple symbols
Table QUOTES
ID INT
SYMBOL NVARCHAR(6)
DT DATETIME
PRICE DECIMAL(18,5)
Table TempSymbol
SYMBOL NVARCHAR(6)
I want to extract only those symbols from QUOTES whose symbols are also in a temp table that could vary based on user request
Create TABLE TempSymbol
(
SYMBOL NVARCHAR(6) NOT NULL
);
INSERT INTO TempSymbol(SYMBOL) VALUES ('MSFT');
INSERT INTO TempSymbol(SYMBOL) VALUES ('INTC');
INSERT INTO TempSymbol(SYMBOL) VALUES ('AAPL');
I want a query that will return from QUOTES the following data...
datetime symbol1 | price1 | symbol2 | price2 | symbol3 | price3
2012-11-12 12:10:00 MSFT | 12.10 | INTC | 5.68 | AAPL | 16.89
2012-11-12 12:15:00 MSFT | 12.22 | INTC | 5.97 | AAPL | 16.22
....
...
..
SELECT DT, SYMBOL, PRICE FROM QUOTE AS Q INNER JOIN TempSymbol AS TS ON Q.SYMBOL = TS.SYMBOL
This returns records that I need to pivot but that's not available in SQLite is there an another way I should be attempting this? Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

try out this
SELECT DT, SYMBOL, PRICE FROM QUOTE where SYMBOL in (Select SYMBOL from TempSymbol)

Answer 2

SQL is doing the part of your problem that it's designed to do: retrieve the data. You can add ORDER BY DT to make the records for the same date-time adjacent.
If you think about it a minute you'll see that a SELECT can't possibly return what you want. It returns table rows, and SQL table rows have constant length. So doing what you call a "pivot" is not a SELECT operation. You may be thinking of pivots in spreadsheets. Databases aren't spreadsheets.
After that, producing the report you want is best done with a little program in any of the languages with an SQLite interface (in Android for example that's Java; otherwise C or TCL). Make the query. Get the rows back as hashes, arrays, or ODM records. The rest is a couple of loops over this data. The algorithm is:
last_dt = null
for row in all rows
if row.dt != last_dt
start new output line
print dt
last_dt = dt
end
print ' | ', row.symbol, ' | ', row.price
end
Another note: With advanced DB features like stored procedures and XML objects you could implement this in SQL. XML objects can have variable numbers of fields. Here the limit is SQLite, which doesn't provide these features.