Re: Warning about null and open question to Oracle

In article <Pine.NXT.3.90.950613090306.17269C-100000_at_iluvatar>,

   John Jones <john_at_iluvatar.tip.duke.edu> wrote:
>I appreciated everyone's response to this, but the majority of responses
>have been to just wrap a nvl around everything. That is ok, but when you
>are comparing around 50 or more columns that is a lot of typing and as a
>programmer I look for ways to cut down on typing as much as possible. I
>just think that NOTHING should be equal to NOTHING. I have heard that
>other databases do this and was really just sounding off hoping Oracle
>would do the same. Oh well, can't have everything I guess. Thanks for
>listening.

There's a very academic feel to their arguments don't you think? Essentially, it is argued that since a value is NULL it was not defined and therefor Oracle doesn't know how to deal with it. But lets be real, what really happened is that when the record was created the field was not initialized to anything. This allows us to make a distinction between a zero-length string and a string that wasn't assigned a value. The argument that NULL <> NULL is purely academic in my opinion and doesn't help matters.

• Jim