"Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield_at_dial.pipex.com> wrote in message news:<3ee8b30e$0$10630$cc9e4d1f_at_news.dial.pipex.com>...
> It seems that we agree that NULL='UNKOWN VALUE', but you don't like using ''
> for NULL in character based columns since you consider the absence of
> characters between the ' termination characters to be a value in some sense.
> If we accepted this what would you practically choose to store NULL
> character values in the RDBMS, and what implications would this have for
> storage ,manipulation etc.
I haven't a clue and don't see it as my problem. I thought Oracle
used a "null marker" to indicate that a column was NULL. For '' is
should store no characters, a character count of zero, and NOT have a
null marker. Maybe Oracle doesn't work that way, but it could. How
does it distinguish between 0 and null? My point is that logically,
'' is the character analogue of zero, not of NULL.
Received on Fri Jun 13 2003 - 04:12:46 CDT
