Re: Null not equal to '' (empty)

On Friday 20 Sep 2002 7:09 am, Ajit Aranha wrote:
> Why is ''(empty) not equal to null? Its a major headache when porting
> from other RDBMS like Oracle. Anyone knows any easy workarounds?

By definition it is different - null means "not known" or "no value" not empty
string. Do you think it should be zero for numbers?

> i.e. if you use: create table tbl (
> c1 varchar(5));
> insert into tbl values ('');
> select * from tbl where c1 is null; will return
> zero rows.

Yep - that's the way it should be. If you want empty-strings, ask for them. If
you don't want to allow null values in a column define it as NOT NULL.

- Richard Huxton