"What I would like to do is to be able to tag the column name to the value for that column. For example:

item1  perl
item2  python
item3  ruby
item4  php"
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For mySQL, you can do it in this way:

SELECT concat('item1 ', item1) FROM basket WHERE item LIKE 'a%'
 UNION 
SELECT concat('item2 ', item2) FROM basket WHERE item2 LIKE 'a%'
 ORDER BY 1
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For Oracle, I used to do:

SELECT 'item1 ' || item1 FROM basket WHERE item LIKE 'a%'
 UNION 
SELECT 'item2 ' || item2 FROM basket WHERE item2 LIKE 'a%'
 ORDER BY 1
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