Rich Shepard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I want the latter case. In other words, if there are no records
where 'category = "natural"' nothing should be returned. It would be
nice if there was a return value that told me explicitly "no records
match the where".
You could write
select exists (select * from component where category='natural');
This produces a singleton result (single row, single column). The only
cell of this result contains integer 1 if there are indeed rows with
category='natural' in table component, and 0 if there are none.
I still don't understand why you want to "look before you leap", so to
speak. Why not just run the query
select * from component where category='natural';
and handle the case where it produces an empty result set?
Igor Tandetnik
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