Question

Need to return a “canned” row when there is no rows in a select. So something like

select col1 from table where col1 = 'something'

if this returns 1 row or greater fine, but if it returns no rows, need to return something like ‘nothing’ as col1. There are reasons for my madness….

I have tried

select 
 case when col1 is null 
 then 
  'nothing' 
 else 
  col1 
 end as col1 
from table where col1 = 'something'

But this will not return ‘nothing’ since there are no rows to process…..

Answer 1

In Oracle I would write this:

select col1 from table 
where col1 = 'something'
union all
select 'Nothing' from dual 
where not exists (select 1 from table where col1 = 'something')

I don’t know how to emulate dual in sqlite.

Update:
As I see, from can be ommited, so the answer can be:

select col1 from table 
where col1 = 'something'
union all
select 'Nothing'  
where not exists (select 1 from table where col1 = 'something')