Question

I have the following SQL-statement:

SELECT DISTINCT name FROM log WHERE NOT name = '' AND name LIKE '%.EDIT%'; 

It works fine on Postgres (returns all different names from log, which aren’t empty and contain the string ‘.EDIT’). But on Oracle this statement doesn’t work. Any idea why?

Answer 1

SELECT DISTINCT name FROM log WHERE NOT name = '' AND name LIKE '%.EDIT%'; 

1) Oracle treats ” as NULL, which means the comparison ‘NOT name = ”’ is never true or false; use ‘IS NOT NULL’ instead. But…

2) The second condition ‘name LIKE ‘%.EDIT%’ will not match an empty string anyway, making the first condition redundant.

So re-write as:

SELECT DISTINCT name FROM log WHERE name LIKE '%.EDIT%';