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 COALESCE: empty instead of NULL?

Author  Topic 

Apples
Posting Yak Master

146 Posts

Posted - 2008-03-25 : 18:06:37
I've inherited a terribly designed database. When cells in the tables have nothing in them, rather than being NULL, they're just empty. So now I can't use COALESCE...

Is there a way for COALESCE to check if a cell is empty instead of NULL? And if not, is there a way to get around this?

Lamprey
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

4614 Posts

Posted - 2008-03-25 : 18:17:01
If they are text fields blank makes sense to me. But, you should take a look at the NULLIF function.
DECLARE @Foo VARCHAR(50)
SET @Foo = ''

SELECT COALESCE(NULLIF(@Foo, ''), 'Unknown')
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