GROUP BY – do not group NULL

I’m trying to figure out a way to return results by using the group by function.

GROUP BY is working as expected, but my question is: Is it possible to have a group by ignoring the NULL field. So that it does not group NULLs together because I still need all the rows where the specified field is NULL.

SELECT `table1`.*, 
    GROUP_CONCAT(id SEPARATOR ',') AS `children_ids`
FROM `table1` 
WHERE (enabled = 1) 
GROUP BY `ancestor` 

So now let’s say I have 5 rows and the ancestor field is NULL, it returns me 1 row….but I want all 5.

Answer

Perhaps you should add something to the null columns to make them unique and group on that? I was looking for some sort of sequence to use instead of UUID() but this might work just as well.

SELECT `table1`.*, 
    IFNULL(ancestor,UUID()) as unq_ancestor
    GROUP_CONCAT(id SEPARATOR ',') AS `children_ids`
FROM `table1` 
WHERE (enabled = 1) 
GROUP BY unq_ancestor