Null Values in DBMS

Consider the sample table ‘emp’

IS NULL operator

All operations upon null values present in the table must be done using this ‘is null’ operator .we cannot compare null value using the assignment operator

Example

select * from emp
where comm is null

O/P

4 rows selected.

The details of those employees whose commission value is Null are displayed.

IS NOT NULL

select * from emp
where comm is not null;

O/P

3 rows selected.

Details of all those employees whose Commission value is not null value are displayed.

NOT NULL Constraint 

• Not all constraints prevents a column to contain null values 
• Once not null is applied to a particular column, you cannot enter null values to that column and restricted to maintain  only some proper value other than null 
• A not-null constraint cannot be applied at table level

Example 

CREATE TABLE STUDENT 
(
   ID   INT             NOT NULL,
   NAME VARCHAR (20)     NOT NULL,
   AGE  INT             NOT NULL,
   ADDRESS  CHAR (25) ,
   SALARY   DECIMAL (18, 2),       
   PRIMARY KEY (ID)
); 

• In the above example, we have applied not null on three columns ID, name and age which means whenever a record is entered using insert statement all three columns should contain a value other than null
• We have two other columns address and salary,  where not null is not applied which means that you can leave the row as empty or use null value while inserting the record into the table.

NVL() NULL Function

• Using NVL function you can substitute a value in the place of NULL values.
• The substituted value then temporarily replaces the NULL values in your calculations or expression. Remember that the substituted value only replaces the NULL value temporarily for the session and does not affect the value stored in the table. 
• Here is the syntax of NVL function.

NVL (exp, replacement-exp)

• As you can see NVL function takes two parameters exp and replacement exp. First parameter exp can be a column name of a table or an arithmetic expression and the second parameter replacement expression will be the value which you want to substitute when a NULL value is encountered. 
• Always remember the data type of both the parameters must match otherwise the compiler will raise an error.

Example

SELECT NVL (comm, 500) FROM employees
 WHERE salary>1000;

• On execution all the null values in the result set will get replaced by 500.
• Similarly we can use NVL null function while performing arithmetic expression.
• Again let’s take the same arithmetic expression which we used in the previous query where we added 100 to the values of commission column.

SELECT NVL(comm,100), NVL(comm,100)+100 FROM employees WHERE salary>1000;