On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 10:07:05 -0500, Richard_D_Levine@xxxxxxxxxxxx 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. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings