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I'm wondering if the creation of a NULL value is standardized across the various DBMS and, if not, how it differs across them.

Andrea Nerla
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1 Answers1

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Short answer: No.

All DBMSs are proprietary and all of them do their own thing their own ways.
That includes how they represent NULLs, both in-memory and in their own DataFiles.

Or am I misunderstanding your question?

Phill W.
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  • No, I think you understood the question. I'm interested in what 'their own ways' are. – Andrea Nerla Mar 27 '24 at 12:37
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    And that begs the question that I refrained from asking up front - "Why?"
    Sure, you can examine truly Open Source DBMS code and figure out how it works but, for any of the big (i.e. paid for) DBMSs, you'd be unpicking proprietary code (i.e. other peoples Intellectual Property) and that way lies [legal] trouble.
    What are you hoping to achieve, here?     – Phill W. Mar 27 '24 at 13:48
  • Well, at first I was interested to know if a NULL value occupies memory in the various DBMS'. My main drive though was really just intellectual curiosity for a question that is almost philosophical (how can a value which is a placeholder for nothing be created?) – Andrea Nerla Mar 27 '24 at 14:00
  • @AndreaNerla, in general there is just an additional flag to represent the null value. But the null value isn't "nothing" - it's a something which concretely represents various cases (including missing data, inapplicable data, and a variety of other usages). – Steve Mar 27 '24 at 14:15