Question

I have a column in a table that is blank. The weird thing is that it does not appear to be null or an empty string. So, if I do this:

SELECT * 
  FROM TABLE 
 WHERE column IS NULL

…or:

SELECT * 
  FROM TABLE 
 WHERE column = ''

I get nothing. Thoughts?

Answer 1

Issue this query:

SELECT column, DUMP(column, 1016)
FROM table

It’ll show the exact contents.

Related: Oracle does not allow empty strings; they’re silently converted to NULL.