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Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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. :-)

Stupid question: Have you been able to side-step the limitation because an empty string is stored as NULL?

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.

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.

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