crosstab

Hi I have looked into the tablefunc / crosstab contrib for postgres and it
appears like it can't perform what I need.

The crosstab function converts this :

row_name cat value
----------+-------+-------
row1 cat1 val1
row1 cat2 val2
row1 cat3 val3
row1 cat4 val4
row2 cat1 val5
row2 cat2 val6
row2 cat3 val7
row2 cat4 val8

To this :

row_name category_1 category_2
---------+------------+------------
row1 val1 val2
row2 val5 val6

Is it possible to do the opposite and go from a column(denormalized)
structure to a row(normalized) structure.

I have a table that is similarly stuctured like so:

Melbourne_figures Sydney_figures Adelaide_figures etc...
10 20 22
10 22 29
...

However I wish to convert like so :

Melbourne 20
Sydney 42
Adelaide 51

I have tried using unions or subselects however the table is quite large and
it takes far too long to run. The most efficient way would be to create a
stored proc that uses a cursor to loop through the table transforming the
data into the new table structure. However I would appreciate your feeback
before writing this procedure?

Theo

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