Sunday, April 16, 2023

NULL values again

Today I learned that you essentially cannot concatenate (concat, ||) nullable columns properly in DB2/SQL.

To be honest, I should have know this of course.

I have a table that records money spent, with a date, text, account and a physical location, e.g. a town, district, ... indicating where the money was spent.

It is nullable because not all transactions need to have a place recorded.

For some statistical analysis I wanted to create one column with text and account and the location simply concatenated into one, like account||' '||text||' '||location.

Turns out, then the location is NULL the whole string will turn NULL

Which reminded me - painfully, after about 30min - that NULL is not a value. You cannot do anything with NULL.

So you have to cast it away to a default value, e.g. with coalesce(location,'dummylocation').


Sigh.