The term has widespread use in various contexts, but is primarily associated with specialized software designed specifically for data analysis.
To illustrate the basics of pivot query operations, consider the Fred and Wilma table (Fig 001).
A quick scan of the data reveals that the table has redundant information.
Using a simple text outline as output, the following alternate layouts are all possible with a pivot query: Summarize by gender (Fig 001): Summarize by home, lname (Fig 001): Pivot query operations are useful for summarizing a corpus of data in multiple ways, thereby illustrating different representations of the same basic information.
Although this type of operation appears prominently in spreadsheets and desktop database software, its flexibility is arguably under-utilized.