---
title: Exists
description: Checks that a field is not null
canonical: https://docs.paradedb.com/documentation/query-builder/term/exists
---

<Note>
  For most use cases, we recommend using `IS NOT NULL` instead of `pdb.exists`.
</Note>

<Note>
  Text fields must use the
  [literal](/documentation/tokenizers/available-tokenizers/literal) tokenizer in
  order for `pdb.exists` to work.
</Note>

Matches all documents with a non-null value in the specified field. All matched documents get a BM25 score of `1.0`.
This query produces the same results as Postgres' `IS NOT NULL`.

```sql
SELECT description, rating, category
FROM mock_items
WHERE rating @@@ pdb.exists()
LIMIT 5;
```
