special marker and keyword in SQL indicating that something has no value
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In simple worlds you can say that Null is not a data value, but a marker for an unknown value.
So any mathematical operations performed on NULL will result in NULL. For example,
10 + NULL = NULL
Similarly if you do string concatenation with string you get:-
'String ' || NULL || 'Concatenation' -- Result is NULL
So you can say that Null means either "not applicable" or "don't know": it is not the same as zero (0) or any other default value, but more importantly, null is treated quite differently from other values in SQL, because it literally has no value.
An example to explain what it means when we say that NULL means UNKNOWN VALUE:
StudentName TestResult
X 78
A 89
B 67
C NULL
So you can see that the student C got NULL marks in the test. So what does that mean?
Now one can say that the student does not sit in the test or it may be that the student's data is not avaialable. But it definitely does not mean that the student got 0(as if you assign 0 to the student then it would mean that the student appeared in the test and got zero) marks in the test. All we can say that the data for the student is
UNKNOWN or NULL
A field with a NULL value is a field with no value. It is very important to understand that a NULL value is different than a zero value or a field that contains spaces.
If a column in a table is optional, we can insert a new record or update an existing record without adding a value to this column. This means that the field will be saved with a NULL value.
NULL values are treated differently from other values.
NULL is used as a placeholder for unknown or inapplicable values. Read more about this here.