I miss my past Oracle career, I've diagnosed this "= NULL" rather than "IS NULL" in so many broken queries, slow queries because of the way Oracle indexing handles NULL.
There is a lot of discussion in this thread about whether this implementation of null checking in Oracle is appropriate, analysing it, but the current implementation is just fine, it has been tested by time.
The internet does tend to rehash the same arguments over and over!!! The internet forgets. I remember these arguments 20 years ago.
[Ignore this comment. It was posted by mistake. I'm only leaving it here for the historical record.]
> the current implementation is just fine, it has been tested by time.
No, it isn't "just fine". It is broken. Just because something has been broken for a very long time and has spawned an entire industry devoted to dealing with the fact that it is broken does not change the fact that it is broken.
Do you have substantial experience with Oracle? or are you just blindly going on what everyone else says?
There is no mention of outer joins in this thread, no mentions of the ability to minus results of one query from another which are basic constructs which handle many of the issues that are discussed here. It says that the people here are inexperienced with Oracle. Everyone here trying to resolve issues using inner joins. Inexperience.
If people here had experience, not only would these topics have been discussed, but the real issues with NULL would have been discussed, one of which I mention in my previous post.
Sorry, I made a mistake: I thought I was responding to a different comment. (I'm currently on a very slow internet connection.) The "broken" thing I meant to refer to was Oracle's conflation of null and the empty string. But I think I hit the wrong "reply" link. Sorry about that.
There is a lot of discussion in this thread about whether this implementation of null checking in Oracle is appropriate, analysing it, but the current implementation is just fine, it has been tested by time.
The internet does tend to rehash the same arguments over and over!!! The internet forgets. I remember these arguments 20 years ago.