Re: Empty strings

From: Jonathan Gennick <gennick_at_worldnet.att.net>
Date: 19 Dec 1998 01:38:40 GMT
Message-ID: <367ddf08.6978828@netnews.worldnet.att.net>

On Thu, 17 Dec 1998 14:41:40 -0800, DDS101 <dds101_at_digital-dispatch.com> wrote:

>(To me a NULL is different from an empty string

It is to me as well, and I don't like this particular behavior of Oracle. Unfortunately, that is the way it is. Oracle interprets an empty string as a null.

>Our local DB
>guy doesn't want to store NULLs in the offending column.
>Do we have to
>store a "magic" (non-empty) string instead?

Why not? Is there a technical reason, or is he just being "religious". Personally, I do not like "magic values". They present a host of problems. One is that you have to code all your programs to recognize them. Even if you are willing to do that, someday you might want to use an ad-hoc query tool. Suddenly your users will see these really strange values, the magic values, and they won't understand what is going on.

I would allow the character strings to be nulls, unless that posed some particular problem.

regards,

Jonathan Received on Fri Dec 18 1998 - 19:38:40 CST