Re: SQL query re unions and nulls

I don't see the problem. select a,b,c,NULL from x where ... union select a,b,NULL,d from x where .... . . This works fine for me with Sybase. You may have problems when you are doing a select into though as it complains about NULL table columns. Andrew On 9 Sep 1997 19:39:43 GMT, proberts@lynx.informix.com (Paul Roberts) wrote: >In article <34159c2e.3795620@news.cableol.co.uk>, >Ian Treadgold <itr1@cableol.co.uk> wrote (but I reformated): >>What I need is something like the following: >> >>select a, b, c, d, null >> from x >> where .... >> union >>select a, b, c, null, e >> from x >> where ...>> >>The problem is how to specify a literal null - if the fields where >>char(n) then I could live with blanks or even two quotes together but >>that won't work for numeric type fields. >> >>One last thing, I need a solution that will work on Informix and >>Sybase through ODBC. > >It would be easy to do using a temp table but I don't know whether that >fits your Informix+Sybase+ODBC condition (I know next to nothing about >Sybase & ODBC). > >Could you maybe create a two-column, one-row table in the database:- > >create table my_kludge ( i integer, c char(1) ) ; >insert into my_kludge ( c ) values ( "a" ) ;> >- the point being that my_kludge.i has a single null value - and never >change that table. Then your query could be:- > > select x.a, x.b, x.c, x.d, my_kludge.i > from x, my_kludge > where .... > union > select x.a, x.b, x.c, my_kludge.i, x.e > from x, my_kludge > where ...> >which should do it. > >- Paul (not a spokesman)