How can I change NULL to 0 when getting a single value from a SQL function?

Question

I have a query that counts the price of all items between two dates. Here is the select statement:

SELECT SUM(Price) AS TotalPrice  FROM Inventory WHERE (DateAdded BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate) 

You can assume all of the tables have been set up properly.

If I do a select between two dates and there are no items within that date range, the function returns NULL as the TotalPrice rather than 0.

How can I make sure that if no records are found, 0 gets returned rather than NULL?

Answer 1

Most database servers have a COALESCE function, which will return the first argument that is non-null, so the following should do what you want:

SELECT COALESCE(SUM(Price),0) AS TotalPrice FROM Inventory WHERE (DateAdded BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate) 

Since there seems to be a lot of discussion about

COALESCE/ISNULL will still return NULL if no rows match, try this query you can copy-and-paste into SQL Server directly as-is:

SELECT coalesce(SUM(column_id),0) AS TotalPrice  FROM sys.columns WHERE (object_id BETWEEN -1 AND -2) 

Note that the where clause excludes all the rows from sys.columns from consideration, but the 'sum' operator still results in a single row being returned that is null, which coalesce fixes to be a single row with a 0.

Answer 2

You can use ISNULL().

SELECT ISNULL(SUM(Price), 0) AS TotalPrice  FROM Inventory WHERE (DateAdded BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate) 

That should do the trick.