Re: When is a record NULL?

Brendan Jurd <direvus(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> So it is wrong to talk about ROW(NULL, NULL) being NULL. It doesn't
> have the property of being NULL or not NULL, because it is a composite
> value. "ROW(NULL, NULL) IS NULL" returns true, but that is not the
> same as saying that it actually is NULL, because of the different
> semantics above.

It's worse than that, because there actually is also such a thing as
the row value being NULL --- ie, there's no row structure at all.
At least internally, that's a completely different thing from having
a row all of whose fields are null.

SQL doesn't provide a test for this case that's separate from the test
involving null-ness of individual fields. Not much we can do about
it though. I'm not entirely sure that exposing the distinction would
be helpful anyway ...

regards, tom lane