Comment by biztos
9 years ago
Wow, I've been working with Oracle for a million years and I didn't know that.
Fortunately, now that I'm over a million years old I'm probably not going to freak out about it no matter how wrong it seems. I might relax my pro-NULL politics a bit though.
This was one of the first things I recall learning about Oracle when I had my first internship dealing with it. It boggles my mind that you can work with Oracle for more than a week and not run into this.
Enjoy your boggle, because I've been working (on and off) with Oracle since 1994, and despite frequently being the "guy who explains NULL" I never ran across this, nor did anyone ever point it out to me.
I would even say I've worked with some top-notch DBA's, and I've at times been insufferable in my defense of NULL as a concept, and the databases in question have dealt with a whole lot of data and made a whole lot of money -- yet somehow I didn't know this.
Yay HN. :-)
In my experience it most often manifests in the form of columns that are constrained not NOT NULL into which you suddenly can't insert, say, a user who has no last name.
Stupid question: Have you been able to side-step the limitation because an empty string is stored as NULL?
I discovered this porting an application from Postgres to Oracle. Another thing that drives me nuts about Oracle is that there is no native boolean type.