(I am certain I once saw the answer to the following question, but I can't for the life of me find out where!)
I create a View as
SELECT (firstname || ' ' || lastname)::character(50) AS fullname FROM name_table;
firstname and lastname are text columns, and firstname may be null.
Unfortunately, it seems that whenever firstname is null, the resulting fullname is null also. Is there a way of having the null-strings terms of the concatenation operator be considered as empty strings instead?