Question

I have to write a query to get the following data as result.
I have four columns in my database. ID is not null, all others can have null values.

 EMP_ID    EMP_FIRST_NAME    EMP_LAST_NAME    EMP_PHONE

 1         John              Williams         [phone] 
 2         Rodney                             [phone]
 3                           Jackson          [phone] 
 4         Joyce             Nancy            

Now I have to write a query which returns the columns which are not null.
I do not want to specify the column name in my query.

I mean, I want to use SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE – and add the filter, but I do not want to specify the column name after the WHERE clause.

This question may be foolish but correct me wherever necessary. I’m new to SQL and working on a project with c# and sql.

Why I do not want to use the column name because, I have more than 250 columns and 1500 rows. Now if I select any row, at least one column will have null value. I want to select the row, but the column which has null values for that particular row should not appear in the result.

Please advice. Thank you in advance.

Regards,
Vinay S

Answer 1

Your question reads:

I want to get all the columns that don’t have a null value.

And at the same time:

But I don’t want to specify column names in the WHERE clause.

These are conflicting goals. Your only option is to use the sys.tables and sys.columns DMVs to build a series of dynamic SQL statements. In the end, this is going to be more work that just writing one query by hand the first time.