perl JOIN-like behavior in Oracle?

Question

I have two tables, let's call them PERSON and NAME.

 PERSON
  person_id
  dob

 NAME
  name_id
  person_id
  name

And say that the NAME table has data like:

name_id  person_id  name
1        1          Joe
2        1          Fred
3        1          Sam
4        2          Jane
5        2          Kim

I need a query (Oracle 10g) that will return

name_id   names
1         Joe, Fred, Sam
2         Jane, Kim

Is there a simple way to do this?

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Update:

According to the article that figs was kind enough to provide, starting in 9i you can do:

SELECT wmsys.wm_concat(dname) departments FROM dept;

For this example, the answer becomes:

SELECT name_id,  wmsys.wm_concat(name) from names group by name_id

Answer 1

You might find this article to be helpful.

Answer 2

The short answer is to use a PL/SQL function. For more details, have a look in this post.