[ http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-772?page=co... ] Kirk Rasmussen commented on HHH-772: ------------------------------------ So much for transparent persistence! I guess Gavin doesn't have to deal with real world issues like Oracle treating empty strings as null. I suppose in his view we should put in DB specific workarounds and waste QA time because Gavin doesn't think we have to support "insane schemas". At a minimum this is clearly a bug because it doesn't honor the Map interface but is letting his ego getting in the way from fixing it. Others have already submitted fixes to this issue and he hasn't supplied a rationale reason not to do it. See http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/2003/04/26/oracle-empty-string-null/ See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/203493/why-does-oracle-9i-treat-an-emp... Tom Kyte VP of Oracle: A ZERO length varchar is treated as NULL. '' is not treated as NULL. '' when assigned to a char(1) becomes ' ' (char types are blank padded strings). '' when assigned to a varchar2(1) becomes '' which is a zero length string and a zero length string is NULL in Oracle (it is no long '') -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - If you think it was sent incorrectly contact one of the administrators: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/secure/Administrators.... - For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira