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I'll have to check out that book ;) Anyway, if we go back to the root question of this topic (working with Oracle strings in VB), the answer really is that: Yes, this is the defined behaviour of Oracle, and you have to work with it at an application level by treating blank string as a special...

SantaMufasa - in the words of the Lord Codd almighty ... ;) Commandment 3: Systematic Treatment of Null Values A field should be allowed to remain empty. This involves the support of a null value, which is distinct from an empty string or a number with a value of zero. Interestingly I have...

Yes, absolutely agreed - I'm not debating this at all. I'm pointing out that from a programmer's perspective Oracle's behaviour is incorrect.

Aha, but surely that's the whole point of this little discussion... ;) I like the concept of NULL representing 0 bits of information; however '' does not represent 0 bits of information. While '' may be a zero length string, it is a string constant, and therefore there is some information here...

rogolia - interesting... do you mean the actual low-level content of the field here - in which case how would you write transparent access methods for this, and would the db remain performant? Or are you talking about using chr(0) as a string value? Chr(0) is of course, not null.

>or just replace all checks for the empty string with is null or is not null? >select * from designer where username is null >would replace >select * from designer where username = ''. Seems easy enough Yep, that's about it. But of course, if you're building the SQL in code, using a...

>If "database theory 101" calls something else NULL, then what does "database theory 101" call the absence of value? you're probably misinterpret my message ... "Database theory 101" absolutely calls NULL the absence of value. It has no value therefore nothing...

incidentally > blank means having 1 or more spaces in it You've been working with oracle too long ;-) 1 or more spaces in a string means it is a string of one or more spaces.

It's one of the fundamental flaws of Oracle. A blank string is treated as null. This is just plain wrong: Somebody who designed the DB engine didn't pass their database theory 101. You have to check for blank strings using is null, this means that your varchar fields no longer have a logical...