An Oracle story: Null, empty or what?

One big argument for relational databases is SQL which as a standard minimizes the effort needed to switch your app between different DBMSes. This comes particularily handy when using in-memory databases (like HSQL or H2) for development and a “big” one (like PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB2, MS SqlServer or Oracle) in production. The pity is that there are subtle differences with regard to the interpretation of the SQL-standard when it comes to databases from different vendors.

Oracle is particularily picky and offers quite some interesting behaviours: Most databases (all that I know well) treat null and empty as different values when it comes to strings. So it is perfectly valid to store an empty string in a not-null column and retrieving the string from the column yields an empty string. Not so with Oracle 10g! Inserting null and retrieving the value yields unsurprisingly null, even using Oracle. Inserting an empty string and retrieving the value leaves you with null, too! Oracle does not differentiate between empty strings and null values like a Java developer would expect. In our environment this has led to surprised developers and locally unreproducible bug which clearly exist in production a couple of times.

[rant]Oracle has great features for big installations and enterprises that can afford the support, maintenance and hardware of a serious Oracle DBMS installation. But IMHO it is a shame that such a big player in the market does not really care about the shortcomings of their flagship product and standards in general (Oracle 10g only supports SQL92 entry level!). Oracle, please fix such issues and help us developers to get rid of special casing for your database product![/rant]

The lesson to be learnt here is that you need a clone of the production database for your integration tests or acceptance tests to be really effective. Quite some bugs have slipped into production because of subtle differences in behaviour of our inhouse databases and the ones in production at the customer site.