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Message Posted: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 @ 20:06:15 GMT

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Castelli:

Remember that COALESCE only returns the first value that is not a null when examining a list of one or more data elements. It is difficult to tell what you mean by '', but it is not a null (normally designated as "?".

It has already been mentioned that ' ' and ' ' are the same or at least would be padded to the same length of 10 if compared. At the same time, I am curious to know if you are saying that COALESCE is truncating the 10 bytes of blank/space to 1 byte of space or zero bytes. If you are then I would have to ask how you know it is 1 or 0 bytes versus 10 bytes. Are you using LENGTH? If so, then you are using SQL ASSISTANT and it is converting LENGTH to CHARACTERS(TRIM(... Therefore, ' ' would have a length of zero and not 10. If you wish to see the true length use CHAR(... without the TRIM.

Regards,

Michael Larkins
Certified Teradata Master
Certified Teradata SQL Instructor

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