> ID Color
> --- -------
> 1 Blue
> 2 Red
> 3 Green
> 4 Orange
>
> How would I rewrite the query to return results where the colors are
> replaced by letters to give the following results?
>
> ID Color
> --- -------
> 1 A
> 2 D
> 3 B
> 4 C
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/functions-conditional.html
this is probably the easiest to implement but hard to mangage over time. Another solution would
be to create color_code table that is referenced by your test table. Then when you can create a
query as: select a.ID, b.code from test as a join color_code as b on a.color = b.color;
There are additional solutions to this also. But these two are probably the easiest.