what's better? NULL or empty text?

[toptomato]

what's better, for a cell to contain a value of NULL or empty text like '' ..?
is there an advantange one way or another?

thank you,

[NogDog]

I suspect using NULL might make searches a bit more efficient in some cases, but that's just speculation on my part. The main reason I'd consider using NULL is for the ability to filter on it with IS NULL and IS NOT NULL. It just seems a bit cleaner to me to do...

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar IS NOT NULL ORDER BY something

...versus...

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar != '' ORDER BY something

(Even though the 2nd version takes fewer keystrokes, for some reason the first seems clearer and more semantically correct to me.)

Also, depending on what DBMS you are using, some have nifty shortcuts for sorting all nulls to the top or bottom regardless of ASC or DESC sort order, which can sometimes be useful.

[firesnaker]

Very interesting, I never really gives this a major thought. I simply uses "" (empty string).

Most related functions I used are coded in PHP. So I never uses NULL.

It might come in handy if you do use the functions inside SQL though.

[toptomato]

belated thanks!