Re: Counterquestion - is Oracle a He or a She - or an It or a hermaphrodite
- From: "Ron Rogers" <RROGERS@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <psinger1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:34:17 -0400
Phil,
I like columns with possible nulls. It makes the developers that use access
code more for them as it doesn't know how to handle nulls.
Ron
>>> Phil Singer <psinger1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 08/05/05 6:16 PM >>>
rjsearle@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> On 8/2/05, Billy Verreynne (JW) <VerreyB@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
[snip]
> An empty string is not the same as a number that is equal to zero.
>
[snip]
>
>>I don't know a better way to explain it than that.
>>
>>Well Mark, I in turn cannot understand why people do not seem to grasp
>>the very fundemental concept of what a null is and what a value is. I
>>do agree that dealing with NULLs in Oracle using state operators is
>>not ideal as its easier to deal with NULLs using math operators (and
>>in most other languages). But I do not agree with the misconception
>>that an empty string is somehow different from a NULL string.
>
If we can spare the ramblings of someone who once studied analytic
philosophy:
A NULL qua Relational Databases: Missing data, all attributes unknown,
could be anything. Therefore,in this sense , a NULL string cannot be
the same as an empty string. An empty string has zero length, while a
NULL string could have any length (if we only knew).
A NULL, qua 3GL Programming usage: Big Nothing. Any attributes as
empty as possible. Here, NULL and empty do seem synonymous.
Similar to the confusion when calling PL/SQL from SQL where the PL/SQL
has PL/SQL data types defined in terms of SQL data types.
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