Database experiences in Python: Good or Bad?

[Bo M. Maryniuck]

On Tuesday 06 August 2002 10:53, Eric Brunel wrote:
> Roy Smith wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > Operationally, the only real
> > annoyance I found was that (IIRC), empty strings in the database would
> > come back as None instead of as "" (I consider this a bug).
>
> It is. In Oracle... Oracle considers empty strings as NULL values, which is
> simply stupid. When you do a select, there's no means to distinguish an
> empty string from a NULL (represented as None in Python). So the oracledb
> module is just consistent with the way Oracle manages strings...

Absolutely. We have the same problem with DCOracle[2] / Python. Alsi in Perl 
after empty string select you get not an empty scalar, but undef, what is 
really stupid... Only what you can to do is simply filter the data what is 
great not-needed delayer and also BIG annoyance.

Also you can have a big pain, using overloaded procedures: they just don't 
work. Only what you can do is using bindarray which is does not work in 
current transaction under Zope... Circle!

P.S. Sure, DIY!.. Yes, we did, but with a lot of not-needed pain.......

-- 
Sincerely yours, Bogdan M. Maryniuck

"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds."
(Linus Torvalds about the superiority of Linux on the Amterdam
Linux Symposium)