Re: Nullology of empty strings
From: Tim X <timx_at_spamto.devnul.com>
Date: 08 Jan 2003 01:39:25 +1100
Message-ID: <87d6n9vxb6.fsf_at_tiger.rapttech.com.au>
Date: 08 Jan 2003 01:39:25 +1100
Message-ID: <87d6n9vxb6.fsf_at_tiger.rapttech.com.au>
usenet_at_kikobu.com (Morten) writes:
> Hi. I'm curious about why the empty string '' IS NULL in Oracle databases.
> Is this a general convention? Where can I read up on the theory behind this?
>
> I would like to find out why this is so, and what the theoretical foundations
> are (relational calculus possibly?)
>
I think this is just a quirk of Oracle. Other systems I have used do
not treat '' as NULL. Also, according to some oracle documentation I
have seen, the '' as NULL in oracle is not guaranteed to be kept in
future versions. I find this a frustrating situation personally.
Tim
-- Tim Cross The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!Received on Tue Jan 07 2003 - 15:39:25 CET