November 16, 2009 at 1:22 pm
So a developer near me told me he hated NULLs because his reporting system could not handle them (thank you Sir Antony Richard Hoare for inventing the NULL..argh!). He said he replaced all the NULL's in the offending attribute with ' ' (note there is one space between those). I told him he need not bother with the space, just use '' (that's two distinct ' characters) otherwise he was just wasting space. Only it appears I was wrong. It led me to another question...So how to you store a string of spaces in an attribute?
Here's my limited experiment
-- build the table
create table Little
(spacer varchar(4) null)
-- insert some rows with varying spaces
insert into Little
values ('')
insert into Little
values (' ')
insert into Little
values (' ')
insert into Little
values (' ')
insert into Little
values (' ')
insert into Little
values (space(4))
insert into Little
values (char(32)+char(32)+char(32)+char(32))
-- Test the results
select spacer,count(*) from Little
group by spacer
-- result is 7 identical rows
select len(spacer),count(*) from Little
group by len(spacer)
-- same result
do it right, or do it over and over, it's up to you
November 16, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Take a look at "ANSI_PADDING" in Books Online.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
November 16, 2009 at 6:35 pm
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