Re: A question of principle

Michael Ho wrote:
>
> > The question of principle has to do with transferring mainframe practices
> > to the Oracle warehouse. Primarily, the use of "blanks" or "spaces" in
> > place of NULLs. I am, on principle, opposed to using blanks where nulls
> > ought to be. I find the blanks to be misleading and a misuse of Oracle. I
> > also believe it sets a poor precedence for future Oracle applications.
>
>
> Your DB on mainframe doesn't support NULL ?

Many mainframe databases don't have the concept of null because everything is block oriented. If they had something that was undefined, or NULL, it was padded with spaces. Thus the difficulty in converting COBOL code to use Oracle AND NULL values.

I'm not talking as someone who knows the mainframe well, just as someone who has seen a large mainframe-oriented application ported to Oracle.

Brian

-- 
Brian M. Biggs				mailto:bbiggs_at_cincom.com
Cincom Systems, Inc.			voice: (513) 677-7661
http://www.cincom.com/