Simple NVL question

[Glen A. Stromquist]

It must be friday, my brain has locked up already...

I want to do a query on a table that sums a column that may have null
values. So I type in:

select field1, nvl(sum(field2),0)
from table
group by field1

ERROR:
ORA-24347: Warning of a NULL column in an aggregate function

Interestingly enough, the same query without the NVL function returns
results when I run it in a TOAD window.

I'm missing something obvious here... what is it?

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[hanna...@my-deja.com]

select field1, sum(nvl(field2,0)) from ...

In article <935d3r$7iq$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,

[Business]

sum(nvl(field2,0))

The NVL shouldn't be necessary. A column with nulls adds nothing to the
results.

"Glen A. Stromquist" <gle...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:935d3r$7iq$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

[John Russell]

Don't you mean:

select field1, sum(nvl(field2,0))

so that SUM is always operating on either the value from the column,
or 0 if the value is null?

For interest's sake, here's a way to find the code examples for NVL
(or any other statement, function, etc.) from the Oracle docs:

http://tahiti.oracle.com/pls/tahiti/tahiti.drilldown?word=nvl&book=&preference=Examples&expand_all=1

John