Re: NULL vs. empty

Steffen Conrad <steffen.conrad_at_gmx.de> wrote in message news:<2hj0fqFddkrqU1_at_uni-berlin.de>...
> Frank van Bortel wrote:
> >
> > Oracle treats empty strings as NULLs (OK Daniel...), at least for
> > character columns (CHAR, VARCHAR, VARCHAR2, NVARCHAR, NVARCHAR2):
> [...]
>
> Hi Frank,
>
> as I mentioned the empty VARCHAR problem is solved by inserting a TAB as
> value. What I asked is what to do for INTEGER/NUMBER values...
> It is not possible to reserve a special INT value like '-1' for doing this.
>
> Bye,
> Steffen

I understand your issue with the empty string and the NULL. But how are number fields affected? If the field is numeric and the input file has no value a NULL is loaded. When you dump the table to a file the numeric field for null values will be blanks, right?

I just don't see the problem on numbers that there is on character data.

  Ed Received on Wed May 26 2004 - 11:54:24 CDT