Question

I have a table, My_Values, which could have some missing records; by “missing”, I mean the content of the record = ”.

I want to get the minimum value of a number of rows with the same name, but the problem is, if I use this:

SELECT MIN(my_value) FROM My_Values WHERE name LIKE 'John'

It returns ''. (a blank string? term?)

I know MIN() is supposed to ignore NULLs but it appears not to ignore ”. What’s the best way to write the query to tell it to ignore ” as well?

Answer 1

Add the extra condition to the WHERE clause:

SELECT MIN(my_value) FROM My_Values WHERE name LIKE 'John' AND my_value != ''