Sybase 12.4.2 manual Working With Nulls, Where Blanks indicates that blanks convert to Nulls, 215

CHAPTER 5 Moving Data In and Out of Databases

•The input data can include up to nine positions for seconds, including a floating decimal point, to allow for fractional seconds. On input and query, the decimal point floats, so you can specify up to six decimal positions. However, Adaptive Server IQ always stores only six decimal positions with two positions for whole seconds (ss.ssssss). Any more decimal positions are not permitted.

•Separators are used between the time elements. You can use any character as a separator, including blanks. The example uses ':' (colons).

•Adaptive Server IQ stores only the numbers of hours, minutes, and seconds; it does not store any other characters which might appear in the input data. However, if the data contains other characters, for example colons (:) or blanks to separate hours, minutes, and seconds, the time portion of the format specification must show where those characters appear so that Adaptive Server IQ knows to skip over them.

•To indicate whether a particular value is a.m. or p.m., the input data must contain an upper- or lowercase 'a' or 'p' in a consistent place. To indicate where Adaptive Server IQ should look for the a.m. or p.m. designation, put a lowercase only 'aa' or 'pp' in the appropriate place in the format specification. `aa' specifies a.m./p.m. is always indicated, while `pp' specifies that pm is indicated only if needed.

•The format specification must have a character to match every character in the input; you cannot have an 'm' in the format specification to match the 'm' in the input, because 'm' is already used to indicate minutes.

•In the time section, when hours or minutes or seconds are not specified, Adaptive Server IQ assumes 0 for each.

Working With NULLS

Use the NULL conversion option to convert specific values in the input data to NULLS when inserting into Adaptive Server IQ column indexes. This option can be used with any columns, but the column must allow NULLS. You can specify this conversion option with any Adaptive Server IQ data type.

Here is the syntax.

NULLS ({BLANKS ZEROS literal’ [’literal’]...})

where:

•BLANKS indicates that blanks convert to NULLS.

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