Re: Much ado about nothing.

David,

Thank you for clarification. I put some minor comments inline.

In article <qgdl6.35808$2X4.118541_at_petpeeve.ziplink.net>, David Cressey says...
>
>In any event, if one stores "the character string of length zero" in a
>VARCHAR column on Rdb, and later inquires as to whether the entry is NULL,
>the answer is FALSE. If one stores the same value in a VARCHAR2 column
>under Oracle, and later inquires as to whether the value is NULL, the
>answer is TRUE.
>
>So between two products, both offered by the same, they can't even agree
>about nothing.

This is maybe why they put a disclaimer: "Oracle currently treats a character value with a length of zero as null. However, this may not continue to be true in future releases, and Oracle recommends that you do not treat empty strings the same as nulls"

This null situation could be viewed more generally, though. Often, different aplications disagree upon semantics of a particular value in the domain.

>
>A more interesting, and philosophical question is "what does nothing mean?"
>

Yes, but this topic has been discussed so much in the literature already (especially, by C.Date:-) Received on Thu Feb 22 2001 - 21:57:58 CET