What does coalesce(randomField, 0) do?

[ryanfarley8189]

I'm looking through some old searches and came across this line. From all the documentation I've found, coalesce returns the first non-null field. In this case, what is the '0' representing? If randomField is null, does it just return a char 0?

[martin_mueller · Accepted solution]

Null is the absence of a value, 0 is the number zero. coalesce(field, 0) returns the value of the field, or the number zero if the field is not set.

[ryanfarley8189]

Great. Thanks!