Date data types and NULL or ZERO

[fernando.olmos at hpa.com.au]

Hi guys, 

A work colleague of mine is having problems with SQL cursors. She is
using a simple SELECT but with a WHERE clause saying DATE_PROCESS is
NULL. Her query does not return anything.

The database is Oracle. I was wondering how would one interrogate Oracle
databases using PH CURSORS, where you want to check a date column that
is blank?

She tried DATE_PROCESS = 0 but the parser rejects this as an invalid
logical construct. We want to check for ZERO but it looks like we may
need to convert the 0 (CAST it) to a date type and not (I assume) a
native INTEGER type. Of course if she uses DATE_CONVERT IS NULL the
parser accepts this, but we know none of the rows have an actual NULL
value.

In PL/SQL, we physically removed a date value from the column and then
used QUIZ to see if it stored the "empty" field as a NULL. We found out
using a "DEFINE a = 1 if DATE_PROCESSED is NULL else 0" came back 0 and
not 1.

Cheers 

Fernando Olmos 
M.I.S. 

HPA
Direct:  03 9217 5411
Mobile: 0410 382 857
Fax:     03 9217 5716 

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