Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:

>
>
> pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org wrote on 10/19/2005 12:35:25 AM:
>
>> Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> 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??

----
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Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664