Select rows repeating for a specific amount

Question

SO

I have a problem with a query in the MySQL DBMS. I have a repeats table with data, for example:

  + -------- + ----- +
 |  record |  num |
 + -------- + ----- +
 |  foo |  2 |
 + -------- + ----- +
 |  bar |  3 |
 + -------- + ----- +
 |  baz |  1 |
 + -------- + ----- +

here, the record field contains some data (it does not matter, let it be a simple line), and the num field contains the number of repetitions of the current line in the result set. So, I want to bring to:

  foo
 foo
 bar
 bar
 bar
 baz

i.e. 'foo' repeated twice, 'bar' is three times and 'baz' is once.

Ok, now I tried. I created a table:

 CREATE TABLE `natural` ( `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB 

- then filled it with natural numbers, from 1 to MAX(num) from repeats . After that, I can achieve my goal with:

 SELECT `repeats`.record FROM `natural` LEFT JOIN `repeats` ON `natural`.id<=`repeats`.num WHERE `repeats`.record IS NOT NULL 

- this works well, but I do not want to use the natural table. So my question is: is it possible to achieve my goal of repeating rows in a single SQL query without creating a temporary data structure? (Since this is MySQL, tricks with variables are also suitable - I just don't know how to do this). However, answer "no, this is not possible because .." will also be welcome.

I also suspect that this is some kind of “general” problem, but, unfortunately, I did not find any relevant information. Update: there is a similar problem here (but at the same time it’s not exactly the same, as it also goes back to the problem of generating a sequence, which I want to avoid)