NULLS and string concatenation

From: Don Drake <dondrake(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-sql(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: NULLS and string concatenation
Date: 2004-11-19 17:12:38
Message-ID: 6c21003b0411190912630d4afe@mail.gmail.com
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I have a function that uses an execute statement to insert data into a
table, I do in my implementation of table partitioning.

Anyway, I ran into trouble when NULL values were being passed in
(fields are nullable) and my insert statement turned into a big NULL.

Here's an equivalent statement that caused trouble:

select 'some text, should be null:'|| NULL

This returns NULL and no other text. Why is that? I wasn't expecting
the "some text.." to disappear altogether.

Is this a bug?

I was able to work around the problem by using COALESCE (and casting
variables since it wants the same data types passed to it).

-Don

--
Donald Drake
President
Drake Consulting
http://www.drakeconsult.com/
312-560-1574

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