SQL Server- not permit empty string and have null instead (similar to Oracle)

Question

In SQL Server 2012, is there a way to have the database act similar to Oracle in the way that an empty string = NULL?

I don't want to permit empty strings in my database and want these to purely be NULLS.

Thanks

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:14:25Z

1

SQL Server has no such setting. Instead you could handle this in your data access tier (Entity Framework example) or in a table trigger.

You can use a check constraint to prevent empty strings from being inserted, thus forcing the client to handle the empty-to-null conversion.

ALTER TABLE Table1 WITH CHECK
ADD CONSTRAINT [CK_Table1_Col1] CHECK (Col1 <> '')

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:14

CommunityBot

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answered Aug 14, 2013 at 16:42

Keith

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1 Comment

Lock Over a year ago

Thanks for that. I've been thinking about it and I don't think it is going to be an issue as I am using SSIS to pull data from Oracle, so I can't see how the values could come back as empty strings anway.

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