Re: Simple NVL question

On Fri, 05 Jan 2001 21:08:17 GMT, Glen A. Stromquist <glenstr_at_my-deja.com> wrote:

>It must be friday, my brain has locked up already...
>
>I want to do a query on a table that sums a column that may have null
>values. So I type in:
>
>select field1, nvl(sum(field2),0)
>from table
>group by field1
>
>ERROR:
>ORA-24347: Warning of a NULL column in an aggregate function
>
>Interestingly enough, the same query without the NVL function returns
>results when I run it in a TOAD window.
>
>I'm missing something obvious here... what is it?

Don't you mean:

select field1, sum(nvl(field2,0))

so that SUM is always operating on either the value from the column, or 0 if the value is null?

For interest's sake, here's a way to find the code examples for NVL (or any other statement, function, etc.) from the Oracle docs:

http://tahiti.oracle.com/pls/tahiti/tahiti.drilldown?word=nvl&book=&preference=Examples&expand_all=1

John Received on Sat Jan 20 2001 - 16:23:53 CST