best practice? null/None (correction)

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 30 15:46:44 EST 2001


"Robin Thomas" <robin.thomas at starmedia.net> wrote in message
news:mailman.985976988.3926.python-list at python.org...
> At 11:58 AM 3/30/01 -0500, Robin Thomas wrote:
> >HTTP query arguments are of one type: STRING. There is no concept of a
> >"null" value; the closest thing you have is an "empty" string like "". In
> >most database engines, there is a clear difference between NULL and "" in
> >any textual or character data column.
>
> I'm sorry to be outright WRONG here, fluxent.
>
> Many databases consider "" to be NULL for textual columns. Oracle 7 and up
> certainly does.

Wok?!  I _thought_ Oracle was an RDBMS -- fun to hear that it isn't
(proper treatment of NULL as distinguished from any data value being
one crucial requisite for being called an RDBMS).  Guess I'll stick with
SQL Server/MSDE then...


Alex






More information about the Python-list mailing list