On Apr 10, 2006, at 04:06, Marvin wrote:

> -[The Question]-
>
> My question here is, is there a String or character in firebird that
> represents NULL for the type varchar such that i am able to do a '='
> operation to evaluate to a NULL value, instead of using 'is' operator?
> If there isn't, anyone have a better idea instead of creating 2
> prepared statements (1 more to cater for variable2 = null) ???

Sadly, no, and this can be PITA. The reason is that NULL is not
"just another value" in SQL semantics (e.g. in your example, NULL =
NULL is FALSE).

If you were using 2.0, you could use the new SQL-2003 IS NOT DISTINCT
FROM predicate, which has the semantics you are looking for. it is
insanely useful for building joins, among other things.

HTH
________________________________________________________
Richard Wesley Software Engineer
Tableau Software
http://www.tableausoftware.com/ hawkfish
tableausoftware com