SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL, Second Edition

Nulls Revisited: A Cautionary Note

Now is as good a time as any to remind you about Nulls. You learned in Chapter 5 that a Null represents the absence of a value and that an expression processing a Null value will return a Null value. The same holds true for search conditions as well. A predicate that evaluates a Null value can never be true. This might seem confusing, but the predicate can never be false either! The SQL Standard defines the result of any predicate that evaluates a Null as unknown. Remember that a predicate must be true for a row to be selected, so a false or unknown result will reject the row.

To help clarify the matter, let’s reexamine in Figures 6-13 and 6-14 (page 194) the truth tables we first showed you in Figures 6-9 ...