Andrew (2/25/2008)

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ACTUALLY I was hoping to get a poll of what people are actually doing to mitigate NULLs - how do I do that?

I am happy to discuss NULL as...

The "problem" with the SUM is that it's going to preserve the datatype, so you end up with some really "strange" results. Such as - anything summing up even...

I'm forcing the like to compare something that looks like this (the @statuscodes)

|2|3|4|12|15|

to this (what I'm doing to status)

|1|

Now - I'm forcing the | on either side of the status...

Select user,

datepart(yyyy,datein)*100+datepart(mm,datein) as yearmonth,

count(datein) as LoginCount

from login

WHERE

...

Use a "conditional count" to do that. Looks something like this (one of several methods - but this is the one I use)

select count(*) as TotalCount,

...

Andrew (2/25/2008)

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Consider a simple table with columns NAME, AGE.

Row 1 = "Fred", 50

Row 2 = "Jane", NULL

Now formulate SQL to answer the questions

"How many people are under 3 years...

Are you trying to get a count by month by user? or do you just want a count by user for the period?

My experience leads me to believe that it is almost never a good idea to perform ANY transformation of the incoming data during the initial load phase. Pretty much...

I guess my voice on this is - it's so discouraging to use that I don't use it. I too have found that it seems structured specifically to put...

LIKE applies to text/char-based columns. If your status field is numeric, then you would need to CAST it to a varchar(20) (making the width appropriate to your data).

So:

Declare @StatusCodes...

Andrew (2/25/2008)

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In the real-world the possible answers to a truth question T might indeed not be just "yes" or "no" but might be, say, one of "Yes", "No", "Don't Know...

By the way - I'd like to post a "null" value to your poll - no answer really applies to my scenario (or rather fully represents my situation).

Google is a powerful powerful thing......:cool: ( I had forgotten what the P was for...:D)

As much as I'd like to say that the positions espoused by our friends CJ Date and Fabian Pascal are wonderful and true, and that NULL should be banished into...

Jeff Moden (2/25/2008)

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I know of no advantage... I did a test once on a 10 million row table where it seemed to run a couple ms faster without BEGIN/END... but...