Question

I’m trying to get DISTINCT and NOT NULL values but this doesn’t seem to work:

SELECT DISTINCT ITEM 
FROM TABLE 
WHERE ITEM IS NOT NULL

This returns DISTINCT values but it also returns NULL VALUES.

sample:

ITEM
a
a
b
b
c
c
NULL

output:

a
b
c
NULL

Answer 1

Try this. “IS NOT NULL” and “IS NULL” does not work with blank values. You can cover both, if the column allows blank.

SELECT 
   DISTINCT item FROM table 
WHERE 
   ISNULL(item,'') <> ''