Splitting an array into columns in Athena/Presto

Question

I feel this should be simple, but I've struggled to find the right terminology, please bear with me.

I have two columns, timestamp and voltages which is the array

If I do a simple

SELECT timestamp, voltages FROM table

Then I'd get a result of:

|timestamp | voltages | |1544435470 |3.7352,3.749,3.7433,3.7533| |1544435477 |3.7352,3.751,3.7452,3.7533| |1544435484 |3.7371,3.749,3.7433,3.7533| |1544435490 |3.7352,3.749,3.7452,3.7533| |1544435497 |3.7352,3.751,3.7452,3.7533| |1544435504 |3.7352,3.749,3.7452,3.7533|

But I want to split the voltages array so each element in its array is its own column.

|timestamp | v1 | v2 | v3 | v4 | |1544435470 |3.7352 |3.749 |3.7433 |3.7533| |1544435477 |3.7352 |3.751 |3.7452 |3.7533| |1544435484 |3.7371 |3.749 |3.7433 |3.7533| |1544435490 |3.7352 |3.749 |3.7452 |3.7533| |1544435497 |3.7352 |3.751 |3.7452 |3.7533| |1544435504 |3.7352 |3.749 |3.7452 |3.7533|

I know I can do this with:

SELECT timestamp, voltages[1] as v1, voltages[2] as v2 FROM table

But I'd need to be able to do this programmatically, as opposed to listing them out.

Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

This should serve your purpose if you have arrays of fixed length.
You need to first break down each array element into it's own row. You can do this using the UNNEST operator in the following way:

SELECT timestamp, volt
FROM table
CROSS JOIN UNNEST(voltages) AS t(volt)

Using the resultant table you can pivot (convert multiple rows with the same timestamp into multiple columns) by referring to Gordon Linoff's answer for " need to convert data in multiple rows with same ID into 1 row with multiple columns ".