Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy(at)postgresql(dot)org> wrote on 10/19/2005 01:02:15
PM:

> 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??

Ouch. I do not know about MySQL. Anyone else?

I was referring to trailing blanks, but did not explicitly say it, though
showed it in the examples. I am pretty sure that the SQL standard says
that trailing whitespace is insignificant in string comparison.

Rick

>
> ----
> Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services
(http://www.hub.org)
> Email: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ:
7615664