NULL Handling In Sisense

[intapiuser]

When data is imported into a table, and a column doesn't have any values. it is imported as NULL. Within databases, a NULL value signifies that the value is unknown. It does not indicate a value of 0. This article will go over different scenarios to explain how Sisense performs calculations that involve NULL values.

The Scenarios

SUM(NULL)='No Results'

When you SUM values that are NULL, Sisense finds unknown information, rather than 0. This is an important distinction to have, because the sets [1,-1] and [NULL,NULL] should have different results when you aggregate them. 1+(-1)=0. Unknown+Unknown=Unknown.

SUM(NULL) + 1 = ‘No Results’ 

This one could be interpreted as unknown value + 1=unknown. You could think of this in algebra terms, where SUM(NULL)+1 is equivalent to x+1. There are infinite possible values for that equation, since x is an unknown variable. Unknown+1 is still unknown.