Re: Differentiate Between Zero-Length String and NULLColumn Values

[Geoff Tolley <geoff(at)polimetrix(dot)com>]

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> AFAIK they don't accept the latter any more than we do.  But again,
> I'm an Oracle ignoramous.  I _do_ know that people of my acquaintance
> who have historically only developed against Oracle have given me
> queries with things like 
>
> 	value = ''
>
> in it, and been surprised.  Or at least, I think it's like that.  I
> do recall hearing a lot about how stupid Postgres was because it
> didn't like something that worked "perfectly well" on Oracle, which I
> was assured was the most SQL-compliant system on the planet. 
> Happily, I no longer work with any of those people :)

At my last job I used Oracle 8i and 9i (standard editions), and I very 
definitely remember the pain of it interpreting the empty string as a 
NULL (especially relevant when input needed trimming).

- Geoff