Posted by Paul on 02/06/07 11:04

Hi,

I don't have any specific details as I do not really understand why
this is happening but we have a customer database that we have been
using and queries on text fields have begun returning empty string
values instead of NULL.

So for example:

SELECT TAB1.DESCRIPTION
FROM TABLE1 TAB1
WHERE TAB1.DESCRIPTION IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY 1

may have returned 50 records in the past (purely an example). It is
now returning an additional record first that appears just to be ''.
Now I am not too sure where to begin looking into this. ODBC
connections, collation settings? I just am not sure where to begin.
The column will not have had '' inserted into it; therefore it should
be NULL.

I have posted this mainly so I can see if anybody else has seen this
sort of behaviour - I cannot see why this has suddenly happened.
The collation setting on our server is different to that of the
customer DB, but this shouldn't make a difference should it?

If anybody has any ideas then I can post some more information.
Thanks,

Paul

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