Question

What is the reason that in measure fields in fact tables (dimensionally modeled data warehouses) NULL values are usually mapped as 0?

Answer 1

Although you’ve already accepted another answer, I would say that using NULL is actually a better choice, for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that aggregates return the ‘correct’ answer (i.e. the one that users tend to expect) when NULL is present but give the ‘wrong’ answer when you use zero. Consider the results from AVG() in these two queries:

-- with zero; gives 1.5
select SUM(measure), AVG(measure)
from
(
select 1.0 as 'measure'
union all
select 2.0
union all
select 3.0
union all
select 0
) dt

-- with null; gives 2
select SUM(measure), AVG(measure)
from
(
select 1.0 as 'measure'
union all
select 2.0
union all
select 3.0
union all
select null
) dt

If we assume that the measure here is “number of days to manufacture item” and NULL represents an item that is still being produced then zero gives the wrong answer. The same reasoning applies to MIN() and MAX() too.

The second issue is that if zero is a default value, then how do you distinguish between zero as a default and zero as a real value? For example, consider a measure of “shipping charges in EUR” where NULL means that the customer picked up the order himself so there were no shipping charges and zero means the order was shipped to the customer for free. You can’t use zero to replace NULL without completely changing the meaning of the data. You can obviously argue that the distinction should be clear from other dimensions (e.g. shipping method) but that adds more complexity to reports and understanding the data.