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I expected the article to mention how in Oracle NULLs are equal to empty strings. Now that is weird.
by irrational 2y ago
I expected the article to mention how in Oracle NULLs are equal to empty strings. Now that is weird.
- svieira 2y agoDomain-embedded nulls are the bane of my existence.
- hyperman1 2y agoOh man. I had a talk with a DBA about how oracle could not deal with an adress with no street name - literally a tiny village with 10 houses on 1 nameless town square. It was unsearchable in parts of the app because street='' was interpreted as street is null. DBA kept claiming oracle was right and the town should adapt their naming to our software. This attitude was so prevalent at the time, I sometimes wonder if the rise of noSQL was simply people sick of dealing with Oracle DBAs
- aidenn0 2y ago> This attitude was so prevalent at the time, I sometimes wonder if the rise of noSQL was simply people sick of dealing with Oracle DBAs That was definitely one part; another part was sharp corners in MySQL (at least as of 20 years ago; I would be surprised if many of them haven't been rounded off in the meantime). The last part was places with no DBA with developers unaware of how to handle schema migrations.
- zo1 2y agoIt's weirder. If you insert an empty string into a VARCHAR field in Oracle, it returns Null back to you when you query that same field. At the very least, I'd expect a software system to behave in a deterministic way. I.e. either throw an error because you're not doing something right (whatever Oracle deems right in this case), or give you back what you gave it, especially for database software who's entire role of existence is to persist data without side-effects.