MySQL SELECT only not null values?

Question

Is it possible to do a select statement that takes only NOT NULL values? Right now I am using this: SELECT * FROM table And then I have to filter out the null values with a php loop. Is there a way to do: SELECT * (that are NOT NULL) FROM table ? Right now when I select * I get val1,val2,val3,null,val4,val5,null,null etc.... but I just want to get the values that are not null in my result. Is this possible without filtering with a loop?

Answer 1

If you want to just omit rows from the resultset that has a null in one or more columns, just add to the WHERE clause

AND NOT ISNULL(someColumn) AND NOT ISNULL(someOtherColumn) AND ...

If instead you want to replace nulls with some default value, you would have to replace SELECT * (which is rather poor querying practice to begin with) with an actual list of the columns. For those columns which are nullable, you can use either the IFNULL() or COALESCE() function to specify a default value when a null is encountered.