Re: NULL vs empty string.

From: Jonathan Gennick <jonathan_at_gennick.com>
Date: 2000/07/04
Message-ID: <h1b4ms0nlftvkam1mcedq2fnfuot89vfo1@4ax.com>#1/1

What you are expriencing is documented behavior. I think Oracle started out equating '' to NULL, and has kept that behavior in order to maintain backwards compatibility. I do know that it's documented either in the release notes or in some other Oracle manual. You are correct in that it is non-standard behavior.

Jonathan

---

jonathan_at_gennick.com
http://gennick.com
Brighten the Corner Where You Are

On Mon, 3 Jul 2000 09:10:16 -0400, "Rich Mycroft" <rich.mycroft_at_synchrologic.com> wrote:

>Thought I'd pass on the results of our efforts to resolve the problem stated
>in the subject line. If one does something along the lines of
>nvl(myvar, -1)
>
>we get a result of -1 as expected.
>
>If we do
>
>nvl('', -1)
>
>we also get -1. The kind folks at Oracle support have now admitted that
>indeed the 8x engine can't tell the difference between the two values,
>release notes not withstanding. Remarkably enough Sybase ASE, MS SQL
>Server, Sybase ASA and other databases can tell the difference. This strikes
>me as a possible, pretty low level, failure to comply with the ANSI
>standards on NULLs on the part of Oracle, but then they all have areas that
>they each individually fail in - so what's the real difference?
>
>Rich Mycroft
>DB Master (If they have web masters then I should be a DB master.)
>
Received on Tue Jul 04 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT