just tried this to see what error I got ( as I could have sworn I had tried it before) and…it worked. Which kind of makes sense seeing as IS NOT NULL is a comparison condition.
Thanks – nice one !

Mike

What about the following:

SELECT team, best,
    CASE WHEN winners is not null THEN winners
         WHEN runner_up is not null THEN runner_up
         WHEN third is not null THEN third
         WHEN fourth is not null then fourth
         ELSE null
    END years
FROM final_four
/

you are officially a clever-clogs and should definitely put in for that pay-rise !
I’ve had another mess around with this stuff and I’ll post a follow-up.

In the meantime, I’ve made some minor corrections to this post ( like writing proper sentences). This is obviously a classic illustration of why you shouldn’t post anything at the end of a night on the beer. Oh well, if you can’t be a shining example, you can always be a terrible warning.

CASE NVL(winners,’0′)
WHEN ’0′ THEN

and Holland works fine.
So it looks like CASE has trouble with WHEN NULL. I’m not claiming that’s a global problem, but in this particular example it definately doesn’t react well to WHEN NULL.