White space characters, NULL values, and empty string values

When the Oracle connector reads data from a database or writes data to a database, the connector always preserves white space characters such as SPACE, TAB, CR (carriage return), and LF (line feed). In addition, the connector does not trim leading or trailing white space characters from text values unless the Preserve trailing blanks property is set to No.

The Oracle database does not support empty string values in text columns. Instead, the Oracle database treats these values as NULL values.

Before writing values into fixed-size text columns, the Oracle database pads all non-empty values with space characters.

For example, assume that you use the following statement to create a target table named TABLE1 and configure the connector to insert or bulk load data into this table:
CREATE TABLE TABLE1 (COL1 VARCHAR2(10) NULL, COL2 CHAR(3) NULL);
The following table shows the input data for the COL1 and COL2 columns and the corresponding values that are stored in TABLE1. In the table, an en dash (-) represents a space character.
Table 1. Example input column values and corresponding table values that are stored in the database
Column values Table values
"VAL1-1-", "V1-" "VAL1-1-", "V1-"
"V2--", "2-" "V2--", "2--"
"-", "-" "-", "---"
"3", NULL "3", NULL
NULL, "4" NULL, "4--"
"", "" NULL, NULL
NULL, NULL NULL, NULL