Re: [Q] Porting SQL to Oracle

On 13 Jun 2003 02:12:46 -0700, andrewst_at_onetel.net.uk (Tony) wrote:

>"Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield_at_dial.pipex.com> wrote in message news:<3ee8b30e$0$10630$cc9e4d1f_at_news.dial.pipex.com>...
>> It seems that we agree that NULL='UNKOWN VALUE', but you don't like using ''
>> for NULL in character based columns since you consider the absence of
>> characters between the ' termination characters to be a value in some sense.
>> If we accepted this what would you practically choose to store NULL
>> character values in the RDBMS, and what implications would this have for
>> storage ,manipulation etc.
>
>I haven't a clue and don't see it as my problem. I thought Oracle
>used a "null marker" to indicate that a column was NULL. For '' is
>should store no characters, a character count of zero, and NOT have a
>null marker. Maybe Oracle doesn't work that way, but it could. How
>does it distinguish between 0 and null? My point is that logically,
>'' is the character analogue of zero, not of NULL.

Then Oracle is just not for you.

Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA

To reply remove -verwijderdit from my e-mail address Received on Fri Jun 13 2003 - 11:44:59 CDT