Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 10:07:05 -0500,
  Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.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 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*

I don't believe this is true.
The following example is from Oracle 9i:

SQL> select 1 from dual where ' ' is null;

no rows selected

SQL> select 1 from dual where '' is null;

         1
----------
         1

Peoplesoft uses ' ' in a lot of fields as sort of a missing value code. My
theory about this is that they want to avoid database specific weirdness
involving nulls and oracles treatment of null strings.