Newbie Question on Coalesce and Char Functs 2

[thermidor]

Hi All,

I'm new to DB2 but know SQL Server and Oracle well. I'm looking at a definition for a view in a DB2 database and have a question about the line below which is from my view definition

select coalesce(brandid, char(space(4),4)) from mytable

To translate the above into normal English, is the following correct: If brandid is not null, brandid, else ' ' (four spaces).

If this is correct, my question is: Is char(space(4),4) redundant?

TIA,
Sven

 

[BrianTyler]

select coalesce(brandid, ' ') from mytable

is all that is necessary.

This will return brandid if it is present, but 4 spaces if it is null.