Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

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

I'm no big Oracle fan; I'm trying to convince my company to convert a
major database to PG. But I can't reproduce what you are saying here.
What version of Oracle are you using? I just tried this with 9i, and it
properly stores the entered number of spaces into the DB. Table t1 is
defined with a single varchar2(10) column:

INSERT INTO t1 VALUES (' ');
SELECT LENGTH(f1) FROM t1;
=> 2

> 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'.

I certainly hope not. If PG is doing that, it's doing the wrong thing.
Would you expect 'abc' to be equal to 'a'? Why then would you expect 'a
' to be equal to 'a'? A space character is as valid a character as 'b'
and 'c'. If the user chooses to ignore spaces, he/she can do that with
trim functions, but no DBMS should do that blindly.

> Port that to another database. Seen the JOIN syntax? *sigh*

I believe you're referring to the 8i (+) syntax? 9i supports regular
outer join syntax.

--
Guy Rouillier