That actual state of a NULL field is that nothing is entered. So saying it is or has nothing is completely valid. The meaning of that state could be interpreted...

The answer is to use bcp. I used the queryout, -T and -c options and found that it omits the NULL text. If a field's contents might contain the character...

Sean, that definition comes from the the dictionary. That makes it explicitly not abstract.

That's somebody's semantics, somebody's abstract definition.

In the real world, it is that nothing is entered. Its state is that it contains nothing. There is, in fact, nothing there.

The word...

Returning the four characters "NULL" is NOT the same as returning something that indicates that the content is NULL or that there is nothing to return. A DBMS should NEVER...

bcp omits NULL, but also omits text-qualifiers, even if forced into the results using QUOTENAME() or '"' + [fieldname] + '"'. CORRECTION: bcp DOES keep the text-qualifiers!!

sqlcmd keeps the...

Here is the bottom line and overarching issue (which a previous post touched on): NULL has a distinct meaning and use in the database-world. In the reporting-world, NULL has no...