title: Changing a null string to an empty string in select statment
body: <p>I have a SQL Server 2005 table that has a string column in which empty values are sometimes stored as <code>NULL</code> and other times as an empty string.</p>
  
  <p>I am doing a <code>SELECT DISTINCT</code> on this column and I am getting all the distinct values + NULL + empty string. But what I would like is to check if the value is NULL and return an empty string instead. So the result set would be all the distinct values + empty string (if any values were null or an empty string).</p>
  
  <p>But how can I do this in a SELECT statement?</p>