Question

Is there any way to count all fields with null values for specific record excluding PrimaryKey column?

Example:

ID  Name    Age    City     Zip

1   Alex    32     Miami    NULL
2   NULL    24     NULL     NULL

As output I need to get 1 and 3. Without explicitly specifying column names.

Answer 1

declare @T table
(
  ID int,
  Name varchar(10),
  Age int,
  City varchar(10),
  Zip varchar(10)
)  

insert into @T values 
(1, 'Alex', 32, 'Miami', NULL),
(2,  NULL,  24,  NULL,   NULL)

;with xmlnamespaces('http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' as ns)
select ID,
       (
          select *
          from @T as T2
          where T1.ID = T2.ID
          for xml path('row'), elements xsinil, type 
       ).value('count(/row/*[@ns:nil = "true"])', 'int') as NullCount
from @T as T1

Result:

ID          NullCount
----------- -----------
1           1
2           3

Update:

Here is a better version. Thanks to Martin Smith.

;with xmlnamespaces('http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' as ns)
select ID,
       (
          select T1.*
          for xml path('row'), elements xsinil, type 
       ).value('count(/row/*[@ns:nil = "true"])', 'int') as NullCount
from @T as T1

Update:

And with a bit faster XQuery expression.

;with xmlnamespaces('http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' as ns)
select ID,
       (
          select T1.*
          for xml path('row'), elements xsinil, type 
       ).value('count(//*/@ns:nil)', 'int') as NullCount
from @T as T1