Found this today

Middle Manager

SELECT ISNULL(NULL,'') as [Email]

There's something oddly zen-like about it :)

Brisingr Aerowing

:doh:

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dakovinc

Maybe someone wanted to make sure that a mapping framework (like .net EntityFramework) made a nullable string out of it :laugh:

Bernhard Hiller

Ed Bouras wrote:

zen-like

Yes: [Email] will always be an empty string, not null (except when ISNULL evaluates NULL as something different from NULL). String.Empty and NULL is an enormous difference for MS SQLServer and most (or all?) object-oriented programming languages. But not for zen-lacking Oracle.

PIEBALDconsult

Bernhard Hiller wrote:

String.Empty and NULL is an enormous difference

Yes, obviously. And I wish XML would recognize that too.

This space intentionally left blank.

Vladimir Svyatski

According to this http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms184325.aspx[^], the expression is just stupid, it is much easier to write

SELECT '' as [Email]

, because ISNULL(NULL, '') will ALWAYS return ''.

lifecycle of a lifecycle of a lifecycle

Middle Manager

Hence the post in this forum. Honestly this was probably done in haste and without care for proper coding as part of a set of replacements in the stored proc of the "Email" field with NULL. Things do happen fast and furious around here and there is no dba to oversee/filter. I found it humorous enough to share with those who like to smack themselves in the forehead :doh:

Super Lloyd

This probably came up for .. historic reason! ;)

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bulg

I also found something similar today

my $select = "";
my (@fields) = ("field1", "field2", "field3", "field4", "field5", "field6", "field7", "field8", "field9", "field10", "field11", "field12", "field13", "field14", "field15", "field16", "field17", "field18");
foreach my $f (@fields)
{
    $select .= "$f,";
}
chop $select;

For those unfamiliar, @name= array variable, $name = scalar variable. 'chop' is interpreted as a function call with the intentional side effect of removing the last character from the scalar you pass it. As a bonus, plaintext strings surrounded by double quotes must be parsed by the interpreter (this is Perl) and variable names within them are replaced with values.