Re: NULL vs empty string.

Jonathan Gennick wrote:
>
> What you are expriencing is documented behavior. I think
> Oracle started out equating '' to NULL, and has kept that
> behavior in order to maintain backwards compatibility. I do
> know that it's documented either in the release notes or in
> some other Oracle manual. You are correct in that it is
> non-standard behavior.
>
> >Thought I'd pass on the results of our efforts to resolve the problem stated
> >in the subject line. If one does something along the lines of
> >nvl(myvar, -1)
> >
> >we get a result of -1 as expected.
> >
> >If we do
> >
> >nvl('', -1)
> >
> >we also get -1. The kind folks at Oracle support have now admitted that
> >indeed the 8x engine can't tell the difference between the two values,
> >release notes not withstanding. Remarkably enough Sybase ASE, MS SQL
> >Server, Sybase ASA and other databases can tell the difference. This strikes
> >me as a possible, pretty low level, failure to comply with the ANSI
> >standards on NULLs on the part of Oracle, but then they all have areas that
> >they each individually fail in - so what's the real difference?
> >
> >Rich Mycroft
> >DB Master (If they have web masters then I should be a DB master.)
> >

I wish they would provide an init.ora paramater to disallow this behavior. I would prefer to "break" apps which use the '' to force the developers to write code correctly. Received on Wed Jul 05 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT