A Little Noise

September 27, 2006

Empty Set Equality

Filed under: MySQL Gotchas — snoyes @ 3:48 pm
SELECT 1 LIMIT 0;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

SELECT 2 LIMIT 0;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

SELECT NULL LIMIT 0;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

Exactly what I’d expect. So here’s the question:

SELECT '1 = 1' AS equality, (SELECT 1 LIMIT 0) = (SELECT 1 LIMIT 0) AS result
UNION SELECT '1 = 2', (SELECT 1 LIMIT 0) = (SELECT 2 LIMIT 0)
UNION SELECT '1 = NULL', (SELECT 1 LIMIT 0) = (SELECT NULL LIMIT 0);

What do you think? Are all empty sets created identical?
Show Answer ▼

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