Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine(at)raytheon(dot)com wrote:

>
>
> pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org wrote on 10/19/2005 12:35:25 AM:
>
>> Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl(at)familyhealth(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>>> Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing. It'd be a great
>>> feature of PostgreSQL. Imagine how many people would start on
>>> PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle
> if
>>> they needed to. Risk management.
>>
>> Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to
>> confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL. For instance,
>> lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL.
>
> 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*

Wait, I've lost something here, apparently ... but that is the case with
PostgreSQL as well:

ams=# select ' a' = ' a';
?column?
----------
f
(1 row)

Let me guess ... MySQL treats them as equal??

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