On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 05:11:48PM +0100, H.Merijn Brand wrote: > "ChopBlanks" (boolean, inherited) > This attribute can be used to control the trimming of trailing > space characters from fixed width character (CHAR) fields. No > other field types are affected, even where field values have > trailing spaces. > > **WHY** only from fixed width character fields, and not from varchar2 fields ? > :(((( > > We've got a multidatabase environment, in which we try *very* hard not to get > NULL fields - ever -. This means we have to insert triggers in Oracle to > inhibit it's fu**ing annoying behaviour of translating empty varchar fields to > NULL. (If I insert an empty string I expect an empty string, and not a null field!)
That has to be one of Oracle's most annoying, er, um, 'features'. > The triggers translate all empty strings to a string with just a single space > in it on insert and update. I am open to changing my mind on this one. I'd appreciate any input from driver authors who either: a) set ChopBlanks on by default (which they probably shouldn't) or b) don't want ChopBlanks extended to VARCHAR fields (Let's defer the issue of which _specific_ string types ChopBlanks should apply to for now and just consider CHAR and VARCHAR's at this point.) Tim.
