RE: Select Statement Q!!!

It is the way it is meant to work. You need to read up on the behaviour of nulls. Take your pick from the Informix manuals, any explanation of ANSI SQL, or any of C J Date's books on the subject. Basically, if a column Fld1 contains a null, then neither the comparison Fld1 = 'A' nor the comparison Fld1 != 'A' evaluates to true; both evaluate to unknown and are ignored by the WHERE clause, so the COUNT never gets to count them. Yours, Jonathan Leffler (jleffler@visa.com) #include <bother.ms-exchange.h> ---------- From: Pinto, Raymond[SMTP:PINTOR@valuerx.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 1998 3:18 PM Q. I have a query select count(*) from table_a where fld1 != 'A' I get a count = 7000 fld1 is char(1) There are 100000 records with fld1 = null This query does not count the null values From what I can see , Informix does not count the null values. Is this a bug or is this the way it is supposed to work Thanks in advance Raymond Pinto pinto@valuerx.com