Re: empty strings select as null bug

On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 15:37:59 -0700
Geoff Montee <[email protected]> wrote:

> tds_fdw assumes a column is NULL if dbdatlen() returns 0:
> 
> https://github.com/GeoffMontee/tds_fdw/blob/fd4696695149b0be143e11b70df14b42acdd899d/src/tds_fdw.c#L1816
> 
> http://www.freetds.org/reference/a00341.html#gae666d141533126babb0235af21bdca0f
> 
> I implemented it this way because I assumed dbdatlen() should be equal
> to 1 for a null terminator character if a string is empty. Let me know
> if this is a bad null test.

Using dbdatlen, you cannot distinguish between a zero-length string and
NULL.  In some versions of TDS, there is no difference between the
two: at the protocol level, a NULL CHAR column was indicated by having
a length of zero.  Later versions indicated NULL explicitly.  That
opened the possibilty of a non-NULL CHAR field having no data, a very
strange situtation indeed.  

IIRC NULL can be more accurately detected with dbnullbind.  

HTH.  

--jkl