Why does Oracle 9i treat an empty string as NULL?

Question

I believe the answer is that Oracle is very, very old.

Back in the olden days before there was a SQL standard, Oracle made the design decision that empty strings in VARCHAR/VARCHAR2 columns were NULL and that there was only one sense of NULL (there are relational theorists that would differentiate between data that has never been prompted for, data where the answer exists but is not known by the user, data where there is no answer, etc. all of which constitute some sense of NULL).

By the time that the SQL standard came around and agreed that NULL and the empty string were distinct entities, there were already Oracle users that had code that assumed the two were equivalent. So Oracle was basically left with the options of breaking existing code, violating the SQL standard, or introducing some sort of initialization parameter that would change the functionality of potentially large number of queries. Violating the SQL standard (IMHO) was the least disruptive of these three options.

Oracle has left open the possibility that the VARCHAR data type would change in a future release to adhere to the SQL standard (which is why everyone uses VARCHAR2 in Oracle since that data type's behavior is guaranteed to remain the same going forward).

Tom Kyte VP of Oracle:

A ZERO length varchar is treated as NULL.

'' is not treated as NULL.

'' when assigned to a char(1) becomes ' ' (char types are blank padded strings).

'' when assigned to a varchar2(1) becomes '' which is a zero length string and a zero length string is NULL in Oracle (it is no long '')

Oracle documentation alerts developers to this problem, going back at least as far as version 7.

Oracle chose to represent NULLS by the "impossible value" technique. For example, a NULL in a numeric location will be stored as "minus zero", an impossible value. Any minus zeroes that result from computations will be converted to positive zero before being stored.

Oracle also chose, erroneously, to consider the VARCHAR string of length zero (the empty string) to be an impossible value, and a suitable choice for representing NULL. It turns out that the empty string is far from an impossible value. It's even the identity under the operation of string concatenation!

Oracle documentation warns database designers and developers that some future version of Oracle might break this association between the empty string and NULL, and break any code that depends on that association.

There are techniques to flag NULLS other than impossible values, but Oracle didn't use them.

(I'm using the word "location" above to mean the intersection of a row and a column.)

I suspect this makes a lot more sense if you think of Oracle the way earlier developers probably did -- as a glorified backend for a data entry system. Every field in the database corresponded to a field in a form that a data entry operator saw on his screen. If the operator didn't type anything into a field, whether that's "birthdate" or "address" then the data for that field is "unknown". There's no way for an operator to indicate that someone's address is really an empty string, and that doesn't really make much sense anyways.

Empty string is the same as NULL simply because its the "lesser evil" when compared to the situation when the two (empty string and null) are not the same.

In languages where NULL and empty String are not the same, one has to always check both conditions.

According to official 11g docs

Oracle Database currently treats a character value with a length of zero as null. However, this may not continue to be true in future releases, and Oracle recommends that you do not treat empty strings the same as nulls.

Possible reasons

1. val IS NOT NULL is more readable than val != ''
2. No need to check both conditions val != '' and val IS NOT NULL