Re: Oracle's treatment of null and empty string

On Fri, 13 Feb 1998 21:05:25 GMT, ragoczy_at_SolarBears.fan.org (Paul Jackson) wrote:

>I'm a developer and our DBA told us today that Oracle 7.3 makes no
>distinction between a null value and an empty string in varchar or
>varchar2 column.
>
>I.E. <null> means the same as "" and an insert or update setting
>column_name = "" will actually set it to null and violate a not null
>constraint for that column.
>
>Could anyone clarify or confirm this?
>

Paul,

your DBA is correct. What he said is valid for all Oracle versions up to now. Please notice however, that Oracle Corporation has announced, that this behaviour will probably be changed in the next major release in order to conform to changes in the standard; so developers should better not rely on this treatment of empty strings in their code, if it should be portable in the future.

HTH
Peter

-- 
Peter Schneider
peter.schneider_at_okay.net