• First question to pose is: Shoud that column have nulls ?

    Second question to pose is: wouldn't a default empty varchar do the same trick ? If so modify the data model so the column is Not-Nullable and put an empty string in all occurences that are nulled.

    If you cannot avoid NULLs, your applications will have to deal with that every time !

    your TSQL options are

    Isnull( yourcolumn, 'replacementvalue' )

    Isnull( yourcolumn, othercolumn ) -- <-- may still return NULL if othercolumn is also nullable

    Coalesce( yourcolumn, othercolumn, ..., 'replacementvalue')

    check books online for details !

    When using concatenation, keep in mind you also need to translate the columns to a common data type.

    Johan

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