Understanding SUM(NULL) in MySQL
问题 Usually when NULL is involved in any equation then the whole result resolves into NULL (e.g. SELECT 2 + NULL + 5 returns NULL ) Same holds for the following case: SELECT SUM(NULL) returns NULL . Proposition #1 What happens when SUM is used to aggregate a column and the column can contain NULL values too ? Based on the proposition #1 why the output doesn't result in NULL . CREATE TABLE t (age INT NULL); INSERT INTO t (age) VALUES (15),(20), (NULL), (30), (35); SELECT SUM(age) FROM t; Output: