Is there anyway to create queries which return 2 dimensional arrays

I would like to something similar to this hypothetical situation

Say I have a table containing information about books, ie. author, date of publishing etc.

Is there anyway I can create a query which groups books by author or date.

eg. If I had only 20 books 10 of them being John Steinbeck and the other 10 Thomas Pynchon.

I would like to do a query and group by authors such that I obtain a 2 dimensional array of size 2x10

The first array having steinbeck books and the second pynchon.

Any thought's ideas and could this be done on n-dimensions?

eg. done on author and year so I get n-rows for books for every unique combination of author and year.

Thanks,
dave

In JDBC, you can return two result sets. In hibernate, you can't: even if you could, it wouldn't help much, as you still have to issue two selects to do that, and thus you might as well do it using two queries.

The ORM way of doing this would be to map a collection of books in each author, then just select all authors. Not an array, but certainly grouped by author.

If you want only a simple report query, returning the books ordered by author (for easy grouping in java), that's easy. If you need help with that, post again.