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Re: Specifying text to substitute for NULLs in selects

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Mike Toews wrote:
Keep in mind that you can't mix data types, like 'NaN'::text and 32.3::float in the result.

oh yeah, regarding mixing data types (in regards to the first post)...

A good exception is that you can use 'NaN' for floating point data types, so:

   SELECT COALESCE(myval, 'NaN') as myval FROM foo;

where "myval" is a field with a floating-point data type. This maneuver is sometimes preferred in some aggregates like sum() where you don't want to take sums on incomplete sets since NULL is counted as 0 whereas a single NaN value forces the resulting sum to be NaN.

There are other special floats like 'Infinity' and '-Infinity', which can also be coalesced in for NULL float values:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/datatype-numeric.html

-Mike

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