Re: Counterquestion - is Oracle a He or a She - or an It or a hermaphrodite

  • From: Phil Singer <psinger1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:16:51 -0700

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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