You could use the CHAR data type (instead of the VARCHAR2 data type).
--
Ron Reidy
Oracle DBA
Deloni wrote:
> Hello guys,
>
> I need and advice on how to turn NULLs into empty strings back.
>
> We have a legacy system (standalone desktop application) written in
> Smalltalk that uses MS Access via ODBC as the back-end. Our management
> decided to port the application to Oracle 9.2 (partly due to marketing
> reasons, partly for further enhancement).
>
> I have created a DB on Oracle and converted all the data from the Access DB.
> Unfortunately, it is well-known that Oracle treats empty strings as NULLs,
> and our legacy applications is somewhat poorly designed - it doesn't have a
> separate persistent layer but a lots of SQLs spreaded all over the code
> instead. What is the worst, there are many places in the code where a string
> fetched from the DB is checked if it is empty, so the application became
> totally out of order. There is absolutely impossible for us to change all
> these SQLs and equality checks in the code, so we need a solution 'in
> general'.
>
> Could you please suggest any solution (if such exists :-) how to get empty
> strings instead of NULLs as results of SQLs in Oracle? May be you know of an
> Oracle ODBC driver providing such a feature? Could I achieve the goal, for
> example, by using triggers or views ore any other Oracle features?
>
> Thanks in advance.
> --
> Best regards,
> Deloni, SPb, Russia
>
>
Received on Fri Jan 24 2003 - 11:09:05 CST
