postgresql return 0 if returned value is null

Question

I have a query that returns avg(price)

  select avg(price)
  from(
      select *, cume_dist() OVER (ORDER BY price desc) from web_price_scan
      where listing         


        

Answer 1

(this answer was added to provide shorter and more generic examples to the question - without including all the case-specific details in the original question).

---

There are two distinct "problems" here, the first is if a table or subquery has no rows, the second is if there are NULL values in the query.

For all versions I've tested, postgres and mysql will ignore all NULL values when averaging, and it will return NULL if there is nothing to average over. This generally makes sense, as NULL is to be considered "unknown". If you want to override this you can use coalesce (as suggested by Luc M).

$ create table foo (bar int);
CREATE TABLE

$ select avg(bar) from foo;
 avg 
-----

(1 row)

$ select coalesce(avg(bar), 0) from foo;
 coalesce 
----------
        0
(1 row)

$ insert into foo values (3);
INSERT 0 1
$ insert into foo values (9);
INSERT 0 1
$ insert into foo values (NULL);
INSERT 0 1
$ select coalesce(avg(bar), 0) from foo;
      coalesce      
--------------------
 6.0000000000000000
(1 row)

of course, "from foo" can be replaced by "from (... any complicated logic here ...) as foo"

Now, should the NULL row in the table be counted as 0? Then coalesce has to be used inside the avg call.

$ select coalesce(avg(coalesce(bar, 0)), 0) from foo;
      coalesce      
--------------------
 4.0000000000000000
(1 row)