On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 10:07:05 -0500,
Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:
>
> Yep. It is not just limited to empty strings; An all blank string, no
> matter the number of characters, is stored as NULL. And a corollary to
> that idiocy is that a string with two blank characters is not equal to a
> string with a single blank character in Oracle. 'a ' is not equal to 'a
> '. 'a ' is not equal to 'a'. Port that to another database. Seen the
> JOIN syntax? *sigh*
I don't believe this is true.
The following example is from Oracle 9i:
SQL> select 1 from dual where ' ' is null;
no rows selected
SQL> select 1 from dual where '' is null;
1
----------
1
Peoplesoft uses ' ' in a lot of fields as sort of a missing value code. My
theory about this is that they want to avoid database specific weirdness
involving nulls and oracles treatment of null strings.
