How can I change NULL to 0 when getting a single value from a SQL function?

Question

I have a query that counts the price of all items between two dates. Here is the select statement:

SELECT SUM(Price) AS TotalPrice 
FROM Inventory
WHERE (DateAdd         


        

Answer 1

SELECT COALESCE(
    (SELECT SUM(Price) AS TotalPrice 
    FROM Inventory
    WHERE (DateAdded BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate))
    , 0)

If the table has rows in the response it returns the SUM(Price). If the SUM is NULL or there are no rows it will return 0.

Putting COALESCE(SUM(Price), 0) does NOT work in MSSQL if no rows are found.

Answer 2

Most database servers have a COALESCE function, which will return the first argument that is non-null, so the following should do what you want:

SELECT COALESCE(SUM(Price),0) AS TotalPrice
FROM Inventory
WHERE (DateAdded BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate)

Since there seems to be a lot of discussion about

COALESCE/ISNULL will still return NULL if no rows match, try this query you can copy-and-paste into SQL Server directly as-is:

SELECT coalesce(SUM(column_id),0) AS TotalPrice 
FROM sys.columns
WHERE (object_id BETWEEN -1 AND -2)

Note that the where clause excludes all the rows from sys.columns from consideration, but the 'sum' operator still results in a single row being returned that is null, which coalesce fixes to be a single row with a 0.

Answer 3

You could use

SELECT ISNULL(SUM(ISNULL(Price, 0)), 0).

I'm 99% sure that will work.

Answer 4

SELECT 0+COALESCE(SUM(Price),0) AS TotalPrice
FROM Inventory
WHERE (DateAdded BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate)

Answer 5

ORACLE/PLSQL:

NVL FUNCTION

SELECT NVL(SUM(Price), 0) AS TotalPrice 
FROM Inventory
WHERE (DateAdded BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate)

This SQL statement would return 0 if the SUM(Price) returned a null value. Otherwise, it would return the SUM(Price) value.

Answer 6

Edit: Looks like everyone else beat me to it haha

Found the answer.

ISNULL() determines what to do when you have a null value.

In this case my function returns a null value so I needed specify a 0 to be returned instead.

SELECT ISNULL(SUM(Price), 0) AS TotalPrice 
FROM Inventory
WHERE (DateAdded 
BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate)