"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 10/19/2005 01:02:15 PM: > On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > > > > > > pgsql-general-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 10/19/2005 12:35:25 AM: > > > >> Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >>> Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing. It'd be a great > >>> feature of PostgreSQL. Imagine how many people would start on > >>> PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle > > if > >>> they needed to. Risk management. > >> > >> Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to > >> confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL. For instance, > >> lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL. > > > > 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* > > Wait, I've lost something here, apparently ... but that is the case with > PostgreSQL as well: > > ams=# select ' a' = ' a'; > ?column? > ---------- > f > (1 row) > > Let me guess ... MySQL treats them as equal?? Ouch. I do not know about MySQL. Anyone else? I was referring to trailing blanks, but did not explicitly say it, though showed it in the examples. I am pretty sure that the SQL standard says that trailing whitespace is insignificant in string comparison. Rick > > ---- > Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) > Email: scrappy@xxxxxxx Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
