SQLite: Read out 0 if field is NULL

You are searching for the function IFNULL(). You can pass two values to this function and you always get the first of those values that is not NULL.

As an example, here, we would like to read out the value of "points" from the table "users":

SELECT points FROM users WHERE id = 1;

If "points" might be NULL in some cases and if we want to have 0 in our resulting data records, we can make use of IFNULL() in the following way:

SELECT IFNULL(points, 0) FROM users WHERE id = 1;

The first argument of IFNULL() is the value coming from the column "points". If this value is not NULL, the value will be returned. However, if this values is NULL, the second argument will be used as return value.

Of course, instead of specifying 0 as the second argument, we can also use any other value or even another field that should be read out instead. By the way, if both passed arguments are NULL, also IFNULL() is returning the value NULL.

If we want to specify more than two arguments from which the first non null value should be selected, we can use the function COALESCE() instead. This function is doing the same as IFNULL(), but it can accept an arbitrary number of arguments.
2016-09-20 at 16:08