Re: Nullology of empty strings

From: andrewst <member14183_at_dbforums.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 16:39:06 +0000
Message-ID: <3175881.1059755946_at_dbforums.com>

Originally posted by Steve Kass
> Theory and the ANSI/ISO standards, as far as I know, both
> make a clear distinction between the known value '' and the
> value NULL, which often makes best sense to think of as meaning
> UNKNOWN.
>
> If you want to know why the designers of Oracle made this choice,
> you might post the question in an Oracle newsgroup.
>

This was already discussed in the Oracle group a while ago. We fell into 2 camps: those who understand the difference between '' and NULL and wished Oracle would too, and those who think whatever Oracle provides is The Truth, and that such distinction is therefore meaningless!

This link should get you there:

http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=3EEB5719.5-
96F0280%40exxesolutions.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dtony%2Bansi%2Bzer-
o-length%2Bstring%2Bgroup:comp.databases.oracle.*%2Bgroup:comp.database-
s.oracle.*%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dcomp.databases.orac-

le.*%26selm%3D3EEB5719.596F0280%2540exxesolutions.com%26rnum%3D1

--
Posted via http://dbforums.com

Received on Fri Aug 01 2003 - 18:39:06 CEST