Nulls

If a column in a row has no value, then the column is said to be null, or to contain null. Nulls can appear in columns of any datatype that are not restricted by NOT NULL or PRIMARY KEY integrity constraints. Use a null when the actual value is not known or when a value would not be meaningful.

Do not use null to represent a value of zero, because they are not equivalent.

Note:

Oracle Database currently treats a character value with a length of zero as null. However, this may not continue to be true in future releases, and Oracle recommends that you do not treat empty strings the same as nulls.

Any arithmetic expression containing a null always evaluates to null. For example, null added to 10 is null. In fact, all operators (except concatenation) return null when given a null operand.

Nulls in SQL Functions

All scalar functions (except REPLACE, NVL, and CONCAT) return null when given a null argument. You can use the NVL function to return a value when a null occurs. For example, the expression NVL(commission_pct,0) returns 0 if commission_pct is null or the value of commission_pct if it is not null.

Most aggregate functions ignore nulls. For example, consider a query that averages the five values 1000, null, null, null, and 2000. Such a query ignores the nulls and calculates the average to be (1000+2000)/2 = 1500.

Nulls with Comparison Conditions

To test for nulls, use only the comparison conditions IS NULL and IS NOT NULL. If you use any other condition with nulls and the result depends on the value of the null, then the result is UNKNOWN. Because null represents a lack of data, a null cannot be equal or unequal to any value or to another null. However, Oracle considers two nulls to be equal when evaluating a DECODE function. Please refer to DECODE for syntax and additional information.

Oracle also considers two nulls to be equal if they appear in compound keys. That is, Oracle considers identical two compound keys containing nulls if all the non-null components of the keys are equal.

Nulls in Conditions

A condition that evaluates to UNKNOWN acts almost like FALSE. For example, a SELECT statement with a condition in the WHERE clause that evaluates to UNKNOWN returns no rows. However, a condition evaluating to UNKNOWN differs from FALSE in that further operations on an UNKNOWN condition evaluation will evaluate to UNKNOWN. Thus, NOT FALSE evaluates to TRUE, but NOT UNKNOWN evaluates to UNKNOWN.

Table 2-20 shows examples of various evaluations involving nulls in conditions. If the conditions evaluating to UNKNOWN were used in a WHERE clause of a SELECT statement, then no rows would be returned for that query.

Table 2-20 Conditions Containing Nulls

Condition	Value of A	Evaluation
`a IS NULL`	`10`	`FALSE`
`a IS NOT NULL`	`10`	`TRUE`
`a IS NULL`	`NULL`	`TRUE`
`a IS NOT NULL`	`NULL`	`FALSE`
`a = NULL`	`10`	`UNKNOWN`
`a != NULL`	`10`	`UNKNOWN`
`a = NULL`	`NULL`	`UNKNOWN`
`a != NULL`	`NULL`	`UNKNOWN`
`a = 10`	`NULL`	`UNKNOWN`
`a != 10`	`NULL`	`UNKNOWN`

For the truth tables showing the results of logical conditions containing nulls, see Table 7-5, Table 7-6, and Table 7-7.