How about inserting 'NULL'? No, I am not kidding...  The following is taken from an 
actual system...

columnA has a NOT NULL constraint
columnA has a CHECK constraint with a list of acceptable values, one of them is 'NULL'

BTW, I don't recommend either approach. NULL has a special meaning to Oracle (3-valued 
logic) and you should pay close attention to how you use it.

"Mercadante, Thomas F" wrote:
> 
> Reuben,
> 
> While I agree that an empty string is not logically equal to a null, Oracle
> interprets an empty string in INSERT and UPDATE statements as a NULL.  So
> you really do not have a choice here.  If you have the need to insert an
> empty string into a column, you have two choices:
> 
> - Define a character to represent an empty string and insert that character
> (pretty dumb suggestion)
> 
> - Change the table to allow null values in that column, and perform the
> INSERT as your example showed.
> 
> Good Luck and hope these helped.
> 
> Tom Mercadante
> Oracle Certified Professional
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Friday, July 18, 2003 4:10 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> 
> Hello all,
> Suppose I have this table
> 
> SQL> DESC FRUIT
>  Name                                      Null?    Type
>  ----------------------------------------- --------
>  ORANGE                                    NOT NULL VARCHAR2(10)
>  APPLE                                     NOT NULL VARCHAR2(10)
> 
> If I do this insert:
> 
> SQL> /
> INSERT INTO FRUIT VALUES ('hello', '')
> *
> ERROR at line 1:
> ORA-01400: cannot insert NULL into ("LIGHTCONE"."FRUIT"."APPLE")
> 
> I got an error cannot insert NULL. But, what if I meant is to insert empty
> string '' ? Certainly empty string is NOT equal to NULL values.
> 
> So how do I get around this?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.
> 
> Reuben D. Budiardja
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> --
> Author: Reuben D. Budiardja
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