The COALESCE function is used to return the first non-null value in the parameter list and is suitable for processing NULL data. 1. The basic usage is to replace the NULL value, such as replacing the empty field with the default contact method; 2. It can be used to set the default value in aggregate queries to ensure that 0 is returned instead of NULL when there is no data; 3. It can be used in conjunction with other functions such as NULLIF and IFNULL to enhance data cleaning and logical judgment capabilities.
MySQL's COALESCE
function is actually quite practical, especially when dealing with NULL
values. Simply put, its function is to return the first non-empty value in the parameter list. This function is particularly useful when querying data, report display or data cleaning.

Here are some practical usage scenarios and tips that you may be concerned about:
1. Basic usage: replace NULL value
When you look up data from the database, you often encounter certain fields that are NULL
. At this time, if you want to display a default value instead of a blank, you can use COALESCE
.

for example:
SELECT COALESCE(phone, 'no contact number') AS contact_info FROM users;
This SQL section says: If the user's phone
field is NULL
, "No contact number" will be displayed.

This writing method is more flexible than IFNULL()
because COALESCE
supports multiple parameters and finds the first value that is not NULL
in order.
For example:
SELECT COALESCE(mobile, home_phone, office_phone, 'cannot contact') FROM users;
This will give priority to display your mobile phone number. If you don’t have one, then look at your home phone number. If you don’t have one, then the office phone number will be displayed. In the end, if you don’t have one, you will show “Can’t contact”.
2. Default values ??used in aggregate queries
Sometimes when you are doing statistics, you may encounter a group without data, and the result is NULL
. At this time, you can combine COALESCE
to set a default value.
For example, counting the number of people in each department:
SELECT dept_id, COALESCE(COUNT(*), 0) AS employee_count FROM employees GROUP BY dept_id;
Although COUNT(*)
will not return NULL
in this example, if you are getting data from other tables with left joins (LEFT JOIN), NULL
may appear. At this time, it is safe to add COALESCE
.
3. It is more powerful when used with other functions
COALESCE
is often used in conjunction with CASE WHEN
, IFNULL
or NULLIF
to enhance logical judgment capabilities.
For example, if you want to treat certain specific values ??as NULL
:
SELECT COALESCE(NULLIF(trim(phone), ''), 'No contact information') FROM users;
Here NULLIF(trim(phone), '')
is used to convert the empty string to NULL
, and then replace it with COALESCE
with the empty contact information.
This combination can make your data process cleaner.
Basically that's it. Although its syntax is simple, it is very convenient to use it to process missing data when actually writing SQL. If you use it well, you can save a lot of codes for judgment.
The above is the detailed content of mysql coalesce function. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

Hot AI Tools

Undress AI Tool
Undress images for free

Undresser.AI Undress
AI-powered app for creating realistic nude photos

AI Clothes Remover
Online AI tool for removing clothes from photos.

Clothoff.io
AI clothes remover

Video Face Swap
Swap faces in any video effortlessly with our completely free AI face swap tool!

Hot Article

Hot Tools

Notepad++7.3.1
Easy-to-use and free code editor

SublimeText3 Chinese version
Chinese version, very easy to use

Zend Studio 13.0.1
Powerful PHP integrated development environment

Dreamweaver CS6
Visual web development tools

SublimeText3 Mac version
God-level code editing software (SublimeText3)

Hot Topics

AgeneratorinPHPisamemory-efficientwaytoiterateoverlargedatasetsbyyieldingvaluesoneatatimeinsteadofreturningthemallatonce.1.Generatorsusetheyieldkeywordtoproducevaluesondemand,reducingmemoryusage.2.Theyareusefulforhandlingbigloops,readinglargefiles,or

The urlencode() function is used to encode strings into URL-safe formats, where non-alphanumeric characters (except -, _, and .) are replaced with a percent sign followed by a two-digit hexadecimal number. For example, spaces are converted to signs, exclamation marks are converted to!, and Chinese characters are converted to their UTF-8 encoding form. When using, only the parameter values ??should be encoded, not the entire URL, to avoid damaging the URL structure. For other parts of the URL, such as path segments, the rawurlencode() function should be used, which converts the space to . When processing array parameters, you can use http_build_query() to automatically encode, or manually call urlencode() on each value to ensure safe transfer of data. just

To prevent session hijacking in PHP, the following measures need to be taken: 1. Use HTTPS to encrypt the transmission and set session.cookie_secure=1 in php.ini; 2. Set the security cookie attributes, including httponly, secure and samesite; 3. Call session_regenerate_id(true) when the user logs in or permissions change to change to change the SessionID; 4. Limit the Session life cycle, reasonably configure gc_maxlifetime and record the user's activity time; 5. Prohibit exposing the SessionID to the URL, and set session.use_only

You can use substr() or mb_substr() to get the first N characters in PHP. The specific steps are as follows: 1. Use substr($string,0,N) to intercept the first N characters, which is suitable for ASCII characters and is simple and efficient; 2. When processing multi-byte characters (such as Chinese), mb_substr($string,0,N,'UTF-8'), and ensure that mbstring extension is enabled; 3. If the string contains HTML or whitespace characters, you should first use strip_tags() to remove the tags and trim() to clean the spaces, and then intercept them to ensure the results are clean.

There are two main ways to get the last N characters of a string in PHP: 1. Use the substr() function to intercept through the negative starting position, which is suitable for single-byte characters; 2. Use the mb_substr() function to support multilingual and UTF-8 encoding to avoid truncating non-English characters; 3. Optionally determine whether the string length is sufficient to handle boundary situations; 4. It is not recommended to use strrev() substr() combination method because it is not safe and inefficient for multi-byte characters.

In PHP, you can use square brackets or curly braces to obtain string specific index characters, but square brackets are recommended; the index starts from 0, and the access outside the range returns a null value and cannot be assigned a value; mb_substr is required to handle multi-byte characters. For example: $str="hello";echo$str[0]; output h; and Chinese characters such as mb_substr($str,1,1) need to obtain the correct result; in actual applications, the length of the string should be checked before looping, dynamic strings need to be verified for validity, and multilingual projects recommend using multi-byte security functions uniformly.

To set and get session variables in PHP, you must first always call session_start() at the top of the script to start the session. 1. When setting session variables, use $_SESSION hyperglobal array to assign values ??to specific keys, such as $_SESSION['username']='john_doe'; it can store strings, numbers, arrays and even objects, but avoid storing too much data to avoid affecting performance. 2. When obtaining session variables, you need to call session_start() first, and then access the $_SESSION array through the key, such as echo$_SESSION['username']; it is recommended to use isset() to check whether the variable exists to avoid errors

How to quickly create new emails in Outlook is as follows: 1. The desktop version uses the shortcut key Ctrl Shift M to directly pop up a new email window; 2. The web version can create new emails in one-click by creating a bookmark containing JavaScript (such as javascript:document.querySelector("divrole='button'").click()); 3. Use browser plug-ins (such as Vimium, CrxMouseGestures) to trigger the "New Mail" button; 4. Windows users can also select "New Mail" by right-clicking the Outlook icon of the taskbar
