Making Lines from Points

Somehow I’ve gotten through 10 years of SQL without ever learning this construction, which I found while proof-reading a colleague’s blog post and looked so unlikely that I had to test it before I believed it actually worked. Just goes to show, there’s always something new to learn.

Suppose you have a GPS location table:

• gps_id: integer
• geom: geometry
• gps_time: timestamp
• gps_track_id: integer

You can get a correct set of lines from this collection of points with just this SQL:

SELECT
  gps_track_id,
  ST_MakeLine(geom ORDER BY gps_time ASC) AS geom
FROM gps_poinst
GROUP BY gps_track_id

Those of you who already knew about placing ORDER BY within an aggregate function are going “duh”, and the rest of you are, like me, going “whaaaaaa?”

Prior to this, I would solve this problem by ordering all the groups in a CTE or sub-query first, and only then pass them to the aggregate make-line function. This, is, so, much, nicer.