alright. That query shows promise, but in my testing I found that I'm doing some things incorrect elsewhere so I've not been able to check it yet. I'm testing now.

As for the "concatenate with a comma" issue, I posted to cf-talk (www.houseoffusion) which is a really good list, and they said that I need to alias the output for it to work. So:
a_fname || ',' || a_lname
became
a_fname || ',' || a_lname as the_name

and it worked.