On Jul 24, 2009, at 9:40 AM, Jeff Davis wrote:

There's no single test, but you can see if it's an empty row with:
 x IS NULL AND x IS DISTINCT FROM NULL
And you can see if it's a "real" NULL by:
 x IS NULL AND x IS NOT DISTINCT FROM NULL

It's funny until you try it -- then it's just scary.

Amen to that.

So here's what I'm doing, essentially (some error handling removed for clarity):

    FETCH have INTO rec_have;
    FETCH want INTO rec_want;
    WHILE NOT rec_have IS NULL OR NOT rec_want IS NULL LOOP
        IF rec_have IS DISTINCT FROM rec_want THEN
            RETURN false;
        END IF;
        rownum = rownum + 1;
        FETCH have INTO rec_have;
        FETCH want INTO rec_want;
    END LOOP;
    RETURN true;

So far this seems to work for the tests I've thrown at it, telling me when two cursors return results that are row-by-row equivalent, including when columns have the NULLs, though I've not yet tried rows that are nothing but nulls. That's probably not very useful, but it is possible.

Does this look like it's a reasonable implementation for what I'm testing? Have I missed anything in the swirl of the bizarre that this thread has triggered?

Thanks,

David




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