Find All Rows With Null Value(s) in Any Column

Question

I\'m trying to create a query that will return all the rows that have a null value across all but 1 column. Some rows will have more than one null entry somewhere. There i

Answer 1

Depending on which RDBMS you're using, I think your only option (rather than explicitly saying WHERE col1 IS NULL and col2 IS NULL and col3 IS NULL ...) would be to use Dynamic SQL.

For example, if you want to get all the column names from a SQL Server database, you could use something like this to return those names:

SELECT
     name
FROM
     sys.columns
WHERE
     object_id = OBJECT_ID('DB.Schema.Table')

You could use FOR XML to create your WHERE clause:

SELECT Name + ' IS NULL AND ' AS [text()]
FROM sys.columns c1
WHERE     object_id = OBJECT_ID('DB.Schema.Table')
ORDER BY Name
FOR XML PATH('')

Hope this helps get you started.

Good luck.