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 (DateAdded BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate)

You can assume all of the tables have been set up properly.

If I do a select between two dates and there are no items within that date range, the function returns NULL as the TotalPrice rather than 0.

How can I make sure that if no records are found, 0 gets returned rather than NULL?

Answer 1

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.