Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com 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

I'm no big Oracle fan; I'm trying to convince my company to convert a
major database to PG.  But I can't reproduce what you are saying here.
What version of Oracle are you using?  I just tried this with 9i, and it
properly stores the entered number of spaces into the DB.  Table t1 is
defined with a single varchar2(10) column:

INSERT INTO t1 VALUES ('  ');
SELECT LENGTH(f1) FROM t1;
=> 2

> 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'.

I certainly hope not.  If PG is doing that, it's doing the wrong thing.
Would you expect 'abc' to be equal to 'a'?  Why then would you expect 'a
' to be equal to 'a'?  A space character is as valid a character as 'b'
and 'c'.  If the user chooses to ignore spaces, he/she can do that with
trim functions, but no DBMS should do that blindly.

> Port that to another database.  Seen the JOIN syntax? *sigh*

I believe you're referring to the 8i (+) syntax?  9i supports regular
outer join syntax.

--
Guy Rouillier