What does COALESCE do? 1

[LeonelSanchezJr]

I need to know what COALESCE does?
I have seen it in some of our procedures, but I have no idea what it is used for.

Thanks,

Leo ;-)

 

[carp]

Coalesce merges contiguous extents of freespace in your tablespace.

 

[Matsul]

It is a function that returns the first non null value from a list ie

coalesce(null,'y','z')

will return y

 

[carp]

Holy moley! Thanks for a new function, Matsul! Have a star!