SQL Limitations for Lists in List ?

[Lars Schärer]

Hi list,

i'd like to use SQL to fill a list with lists,
like i have a list of customers and i want each customers line in the list to contain a list of contracts for this customer.
Now it seems clumsy to me to first select the list of customers and then to loop the list and fill each list of contracts.

So to do this in one step i'd like to do something like

Select customer.lastname, (Select contract.date from contracts where contract.customer_rsn = customer.rsn) as contractlist from customers

this does not seem very fancy to me, of course the there might be a need for some casting telling the SQL Server and/or Omnis how to seperate the fiels.

Is this really beyond current SQL implementations?
Do i really have to use olap functions or recursive sql to concatenate the values and compose the list myself if i want to do this on the backend?
Seems a common problem to me.

Any wisdom?

LArs