Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Data Management:
DataServer for Microsoft SQL Server

Unknown value (?)

The DataServer supports null values. Procedures that use a null value behave exactly as they do when accessing an Unknown value (?) in an OpenEdge database, except for one difference—you cannot compare a field to the Unknown value (?) if the field is not allowed to hold the Unknown value (?) (i.e., is not null-capable). For example, if the cust-num field is not null-capable, the following statement fails at run time:

FIND cust WHERE cust-num <> ?

A column that is not null-capable is marked “mandatory” in the schema holder.

In a DataServer application, you assign the Unknown value (?) to a column by using the question mark operator (?), which the DataServer translates to the appropriate null-value representation. For example, the following procedure assigns the Unknown value (?) to the address2 field of the customer table:

FIND FIRST customer. address2 = ?.