Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 10:07:05 -0500,
Richard_D_Levine(at)raytheon(dot)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.