Oracle 7.1 Compatibility

Greetings, all...

My employer is using an outside Consulting company to develop a software package that is in Oracle utilizing PowerBuilder. our current release of Oracle is 7.0.16.4 (I'm pretty sure about the .4 part) and the outside Co. is using Oracle 7.1.4 (definitely 7.1 though).

They are telling me that the 'IS NULL' predicate in the WHERE clause is giving them errors when they try to create the .EXE file. Apparently, PB goes thru and validates all SQL before creating the .EXE file(I'm not a PB person, so I'm taking this at face value).

I have used DB2 on the mainframe, Oracle on UNIX and MS-Access on a PC and all do not accept '= NULL' as valid, yet I am told that PB will only validate the SQL call on the Oracle 7.1 DB if '= NULL' is coded. the 'IS NULL' predicate comes back as invalid?

Does anyone have any knowledge to this affect? I fnid it difficult to believe that Oracle would change the ANSI standard of the language so trivially, or that they would do it at all seing as how it goes completely against the standard!

Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated... Thank you in advance...

Raul                         |/
wrv_at_StarZ.Microserve.Com    d@@d
                             .O