All;

I have a need to create a view.  The data table does not exist yet, the question is on how to best set it up in postgres.  The resulting view has to be spreadsheet-like, and will be loaded directly via ODBC into Excel for number crunching.  Maybe something like:
      

Report Type #1
Date	Location 1	Location 2	Location 3	Location 4
Jan 2006	5	77	23	233
Feb 2006	7	556	233	269
March 2006	8	5666	1024	100

I could mirror that exact structure in a SQL table, but I'd loose the relation (since the column headings actually refer to an associated table).

Now if I were just working in pure SQL, I'd build it in a relational manner, with a long series of rows:

report_type	date	xx_location	value
1	Jan 2006	2	77
1	Feb 2006	2	556
3	Jan 2006	4	99.5
1	Jan 2006	1	5
3	Jan 2006	4	3.14159

It would be relational, but I don't know how to convert it to a sorted and grid-like "view", without a (perl) script.  Any thoughts on this? One thought is to swap the rows and columns.  But then I have dates as the column names, which seems inelegant.