Here's a script that I use when I want columns turned into rows and vice-versa (assuming tab delimiters for both input and output). The code itself is 4 lines (including the shebang line, which covers most of the work), and the rest is docs.
This is especially handy when I just want to see a row or two from a table with lots of columns, and the first line of data fed to the script is the column labels.
#!/usr/bin/perl -l -n
@F = split/\t/;
$a[$_][$.-1] = $F[$_] for (0..$#F);
END{ print join "\t", @{$a[$_]} for (0..$#a) }
=head1 NAME
transpose-tsv -- invert a tab-delimited table
=head1 DESCRIPTION
This stdin-stdout filter assumes that the input is two or more lines
of plain text consisting of tab-separated-values, and that all lines
have a consistent number of fields. (It doesn't do sanity checks.)
The output will be transposed (or inverted), so that what had been
columns in the input become rows, and vice-versa. Input like this:
heading1 heading2 heading3
value11 value12 value13
value21 value22 value23
value31 value32 value33
will be output like this:
heading1 value11 value21 value31
heading2 value12 value22 value32
heading3 value13 value23 value33
=head1 AUTHOR
David Graff
=cut
Update: forgot to mention (in case it's not obvious): given this little script, the only other thing you need is something that will dump your mysql table content to stdout as one tab-delimited row per line, so you can pipe its output to this script. You probably want that sort of tsv table-dump tool anyway, if you don't have one already.
