Oracle's treatment of null and empty string

I'm a developer and our DBA told us today that Oracle 7.3 makes no distinction between a null value and an empty string in varchar or varchar2 column.

I.E. <null> means the same as "" and an insert or update setting column_name = "" will actually set it to null and violate a not null constraint for that column.

Could anyone clarify or confirm this?

Thanks
Paul Jackson Received on Fri Feb 13 1998 - 00:00:00 CST