Hi Steve, > I believe count will only count not-null anyway > so this will always return zero.
Understood. But that doesn't help me... What I need is a query expression that I can substitute for isblabla below: select maf from gallo.sds_seq_reg_shw where maf isblabla; Regards, Tena Sakai tsa...@gallo.ucsf.edu -----Original Message----- From: Steve Crawford [mailto:scrawf...@pinpointresearch.com] Sent: Tue 6/30/2009 3:39 PM To: Tena Sakai Cc: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org Subject: Re: [SQL] it's not NULL, then what is it? ... > > > canon=# select count(maf) from gallo.sds_seq_reg_shw > canon-# where maf ISNULL; > count > ------- > 0 > (1 row) > I believe count will only count not-null anyway so this will always return zero. Try count(*) instead of count(maf). Here's an example: st...@[local]=> select * from barr; LOG: duration: 0.226 ms a | b ---+--- a | b c | d | e (3 rows) st...@[local]=> select coalesce(a, 'a is null'), coalesce(b, 'b is null') from barr; LOG: duration: 0.283 ms coalesce | coalesce -----------+---------- a | b c | d a is null | e (3 rows) st...@[local]=> select count(a) from barr; LOG: duration: 0.339 ms count ------- 2 (1 row) st...@[local]=> select count(*) from barr where a isnull; LOG: duration: 0.350 ms count ------- 1 (1 row)