Re: Counterquestion - is Oracle a He or a She - or an It or a hermaphrodite

From: Ron Rogers <RROGERS_at_galottery.org>
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:34:17 -0400
Message-Id: <s2f38713.043@glcclst_gw.galottery.org>

Phil,
 I like columns with possible nulls. It makes the developers that use access code more for them as it doesn't know how to handle nulls. Ron

>>> Phil Singer <psinger1_at_chartermi.net> 08/05/05 6:16 PM >>>
rjsearle_at_gmail.com wrote:

> On 8/2/05, Billy Verreynne (JW) <VerreyB_at_telkom.co.za> wrote:
> 
> 

[snip]
> An empty string is not the same as a number that is equal to zero. >
[snip]

> 

>>I don't know a better way to explain it than that.
>>
>>Well Mark, I in turn cannot understand why people do not seem to grasp
>>the very fundemental concept of what a null is and what a value is. I
>>do agree that dealing with NULLs in Oracle using state operators is
>>not ideal as its easier to deal with NULLs using math operators (and
>>in most other languages). But I do not agree with the misconception
>>that an empty string is somehow different from a NULL string.
>

If we can spare the ramblings of someone who once studied analytic philosophy:

A NULL qua Relational Databases: Missing data, all attributes unknown, could be anything. Therefore,in this sense , a NULL string cannot be the same as an empty string. An empty string has zero length, while a NULL string could have any length (if we only knew).

A NULL, qua 3GL Programming usage: Big Nothing. Any attributes as empty as possible. Here, NULL and empty do seem synonymous.

Similar to the confusion when calling PL/SQL from SQL where the PL/SQL has PL/SQL data types defined in terms of SQL data types.

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Received on Fri Aug 05 2005 - 14:36:45 CDT