Return to Question

There are plenty of explanations of why NOT IN NULL doesn't work, but I didn't see any solutions. (recent question here: Why does NOT IN with a set containing NULL always return FALSE/NULL?)

I have 6 optional arguments to a stored procedure that are used to filter a certain value of a query. The previous developer did something like this:

IF @var1 IS NULL AND ..... 

    select ...

else

    select ...
    where value in (@var1, ...)

I didn't particularly like this. (The query is quite massive), so I decided to opt for something like this:
(We had the results in a temp table anyway)

IF @var IS NOT NULL OR ...

    delete from #temp where value not in (@var1,...)

But I realized that this won't work.

The only thing I can think to do is to create another temp table that will hold only the not-null values in @var1, etc. (Either using if statements or deleting where is NULL) and then doing a join delete on this table.

Is there a better way?

There are plenty of explanations of why NOT IN NULL doesn't work, but I didn't see any solutions. (recent question here: Why does NOT IN with a set containing NULL always return FALSE/NULL?)

I have 6 optional arguments to a stored procedure that are used to filter a certain value of a query. The previous developer did something like this:

IF @var1 IS NULL AND ..... 

    select ...

else

    select ...
    where value in (@var1, ...)

I didn't particularly like this. (The query is quite massive), so I decided to opt for something like this:
(We had the results in a temp table anyway)

IF @var IS NOT NULL OR ...

    delete from #temp where value not in (@var1,...)

But I realized that this won't work.

The only thing I can think to do is to create another temp table that will hold only the not-null values in @var1, etc. (Either using if statements or deleting where is NULL) and then doing a join delete on this table.

Is there a better way?

There are plenty of explanations of why not NOT IN NULL doesn't work, but I didn't see any solutions. (recent question here: Why does NOT IN with a set containing NULL always return FALSE/NULL?)

I have 6 optional arguments to a stored procedure that are used to filter a certain value of a query. The previous developer did something like this:

IF @var1 IS NULL AND ..... 

    select ...

else

    select ...
    where value in (@var1, ...)

I didn't particularly like this. (The query is quite massive), so I decided to opt for something like this:
(We had the results in a temp table anyway)

IF @var IS NOT NULL OR ...

    delete from #temp where value not in (@var1,...)

But I realized that this won't work.

The only thing I can think to do is to create another temp table that will hold only the not-null values in @var1, etc. (Either using if statements or deleting where is NULL) and then doing a join delete on this table.

Is there a better way?

There are plenty of explanations of why NOT IN NULL doesn't work, but I didn't see any solutions. (recent question here: Why does NOT IN with a set containing NULL always return FALSE/NULL?)

I have 6 optional arguments to a stored procedure that are used to filter a certain value of a query. The previous developer did something like this:

IF @var1 IS NULL AND ..... 

    select ...

else

    select ...
    where value in (@var1, ...)

I didn't particularly like this. (The query is quite massive), so I decided to opt for something like this:
(We had the results in a temp table anyway)

IF @var IS NOT NULL OR ...

    delete from #temp where value not in (@var1,...)

But I realized that this won't work.

The only thing I can think to do is to create another temp table that will hold only the not-null values in @var1, etc. (Either using if statements or deleting where is NULL) and then doing a join delete on this table.

Is there a better way?