2 ms·
I’m still astonished by Oracle where NULL and empty string are equivalent.
by irrational 3y ago
I’m still astonished by Oracle where NULL and empty string are equivalent.
- orthoxerox 3y agoI know they are the odd DBMS out, but when you live strictly in Oracle land, this decision makes sense. Yes, you could theoretically use an empty string to mean "we know this value is blank" and a NULL to mean "we don't know the value", but I've never had to encode this distinction in my schemas. In exchange, I've never had to worry about data being misinterpreted because a NULL didn't survive a roundtrip to the client or because someone filtered out empty strings, but forgot about NULLs.