This section describes the SQL-compliant conditional expressions available in PostgreSQL.
If your needs go beyond the capabilities of these conditional expressions, you might want to consider writing a server-side function in a more expressive programming language.
CASE
   The SQL CASE expression is a
   generic conditional expression, similar to if/else statements in
   other programming languages:
CASE WHENconditionTHENresult[WHEN ...] [ELSEresult] END
   CASE clauses can be used wherever
   an expression is valid.  Each condition is an
   expression that returns a boolean result.  If the condition's
   result is true, the value of the CASE expression is the
   result that follows the condition, and the
   remainder of the CASE expression is not processed.  If the
   condition's result is not true, any subsequent WHEN clauses
   are examined in the same manner.  If no WHEN
   condition yields true, the value of the
   CASE expression is the result of the
   ELSE clause.  If the ELSE clause is
   omitted and no condition is true, the result is null.
  
An example:
SELECT * FROM test;
 a
---
 1
 2
 3
SELECT a,
       CASE WHEN a=1 THEN 'one'
            WHEN a=2 THEN 'two'
            ELSE 'other'
       END
    FROM test;
 a | case
---+-------
 1 | one
 2 | two
 3 | other
   The data types of all the result
   expressions must be convertible to a single output type.
   See Section 10.5 for more details.
  
   There is a “simple” form of CASE expression
   that is a variant of the general form above:
CASEexpressionWHENvalueTHENresult[WHEN ...] [ELSEresult] END
   The first
   expression is computed, then compared to
   each of the value expressions in the
   WHEN clauses until one is found that is equal to it.  If
   no match is found, the result of the
   ELSE clause (or a null value) is returned.  This is similar
   to the switch statement in C.
  
    The example above can be written using the simple
    CASE syntax:
SELECT a,
       CASE a WHEN 1 THEN 'one'
              WHEN 2 THEN 'two'
              ELSE 'other'
       END
    FROM test;
 a | case
---+-------
 1 | one
 2 | two
 3 | other
    A CASE expression does not evaluate any subexpressions
    that are not needed to determine the result.  For example, this is a
    possible way of avoiding a division-by-zero failure:
SELECT ... WHERE CASE WHEN x <> 0 THEN y/x > 1.5 ELSE false END;
     As described in Section 4.2.14, there are various
     situations in which subexpressions of an expression are evaluated at
     different times, so that the principle that “CASE
     evaluates only necessary subexpressions” is not ironclad.  For
     example a constant 1/0 subexpression will usually result in
     a division-by-zero failure at planning time, even if it's within
     a CASE arm that would never be entered at run time.
    
COALESCECOALESCE(value[, ...])
   The COALESCE function returns the first of its
   arguments that is not null.  Null is returned only if all arguments
   are null.  It is often used to substitute a default value for
   null values when data is retrieved for display, for example:
SELECT COALESCE(description, short_description, '(none)') ...
   This returns description if it is not null, otherwise
   short_description if it is not null, otherwise (none).
  
    Like a CASE expression, COALESCE only
    evaluates the arguments that are needed to determine the result;
    that is, arguments to the right of the first non-null argument are
    not evaluated.  This SQL-standard function provides capabilities similar
    to NVL and IFNULL, which are used in some other
    database systems.
   
NULLIFNULLIF(value1,value2)
   The NULLIF function returns a null value if
   value1 equals value2;
   otherwise it returns value1.
   This can be used to perform the inverse operation of the
   COALESCE example given above:
SELECT NULLIF(value, '(none)') ...
   In this example, if value is (none),
   null is returned, otherwise the value of value
   is returned.
  
GREATEST and LEASTGREATEST(value[, ...])
LEAST(value[, ...])
    The GREATEST and LEAST functions select the
    largest or smallest value from a list of any number of expressions.
    The expressions must all be convertible to a common data type, which
    will be the type of the result
    (see Section 10.5 for details).  NULL values
    in the list are ignored.  The result will be NULL only if all the
    expressions evaluate to NULL.
   
    Note that GREATEST and LEAST are not in
    the SQL standard, but are a common extension.  Some other databases
    make them return NULL if any argument is NULL, rather than only when
    all are NULL.