RE: Empty String is interpreted as NULL

Reuben,

While I agree that an empty string is not logically equal to a null, Oracle interprets an empty string in INSERT and UPDATE statements as a NULL. So you really do not have a choice here. If you have the need to insert an empty string into a column, you have two choices:

• Define a character to represent an empty string and insert that character
  (pretty dumb suggestion)
  
• Change the table to allow null values in that column, and perform the INSERT as your example showed.

Good Luck and hope these helped.

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----
From: Reuben D. Budiardja [mailto:techlist_at_voyager.phys.utk.edu] Sent: Friday, July 18, 2003 4:10 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Empty String is interpreted as NULL

Hello all,
Suppose I have this table

SQL> DESC FRUIT

 Name                                      Null?    Type
 ----------------------------------------- -------- 
 ORANGE                                    NOT NULL VARCHAR2(10)
 APPLE                                     NOT NULL VARCHAR2(10)

If I do this insert:

SQL> /
INSERT INTO FRUIT VALUES ('hello', '')
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01400: cannot insert NULL into ("LIGHTCONE"."FRUIT"."APPLE")

I got an error cannot insert NULL. But, what if I meant is to insert empty string '' ? Certainly empty string is NOT equal to NULL values.

So how do I get around this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Reuben D. Budiardja

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Reuben D. Budiardja
  INET: techlist_at_voyager.phys.utk.edu

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