Hi,

> > Of course you get NULL, NULL is a state meaning UNKNOWN - something
> > that can be very different from an empty string. Hence, you can never
> >
> > know the result when NULL is involved in any computation and the
> > result must be NULL.
>
> That's correct; according to "SQL Instant Reference" by Martin Gruber,
> "If either of the strings being concatenated is NULL, the result of the
> concatenation also is NULL." (p. 248.)
>
> Interestingly, though, I just tried it with Oracle 8i and it treated a
> null field as a zero-length string.

I believe that's a setting in Oracle. Either way - I wouldn't go as far
to call Oracle "standard compliant" regarding... well... anything :-)


With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - developer tool for InterBase, Firebird & MS SQL Server.
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com