MySQL: selecting rows where a column is null

SQL NULL's special, and you have to do WHERE field IS NULL, as NULL cannot be equal to anything,

including itself (ie: NULL = NULL is always false).

See Rule 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd%27s_12_rules

As all are given answers I want to add little more. I had also faced the same issue.

Why did your query fail? You have,

SELECT pid FROM planets WHERE userid = NULL;

This will not give you the expected result, because from mysql doc

In SQL, the NULL value is never true in comparison to any other value, even NULL. An expression that contains NULL always produces a NULL value unless otherwise indicated in the documentation for the operators and functions involved in the expression.

Emphasis mine.

To search for column values that are NULL, you cannot use an expr = NULL test. The following statement returns no rows, because expr = NULL is never true for any expression

Solution

SELECT pid FROM planets WHERE userid IS NULL; 

To test for NULL, use the IS NULL and IS NOT NULL operators.

• operator IS NULL tests whether a value is NULL.
• operator IS NOT NULL tests whether a value is not NULL.
• MySQL comparison operators

There's also a <=> operator:

SELECT pid FROM planets WHERE userid <=> NULL

Would work. The nice thing is that <=> can also be used with non-NULL values:

SELECT NULL <=> NULL yields 1.

SELECT 42 <=> 42 yields 1 as well.

See here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/comparison-operators.html#operator_equal-to

SELECT pid FROM planets WHERE userid IS NULL