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More on VARCHAR2 versus VARCHAR

EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Brian Peasland

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QUESTION POSED ON: 15 January 2003
Re: Why does Oracle recommend using VARCHAR2 instead of VARCHAR datatypes?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe VARCHAR is an ANSI standard datatype that allows zero length strings that are not null (which Oracle doesn't support.) If Oracle ever complies with the ANSI standard code, that specifies VARCHAR may break. The semantics of VARCHAR2 won't change in future releases, except to increase the max allowable size.

EXPERT RESPONSE

Actually, Oracle Corp. has changed the semantics of the VARCHAR2 datatype. Currently, in Oracle 9i, when you insert a zero length string into a VARCHAR2 column, Oracle treats this the same as if you insert a NULL value into that column. But it wasn't always this way. Previous versions of the database treated zero length strings and NULL values as two distinctly different items.

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