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What is an indicator variable and why should I use it?

April 26, 2017indicator

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What is an indicator variable and why should I use it?

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Indicator variables are used to explicitly handle NULL values. When you SELECT or FETCH a NULL value into a host variable/array an “ORA-01405: fetched column values is NULL” run-time error will result. This behaviour was introduced with Oracle7 when you recompiled your programs with the DBMS=V7 (the default) precompiler option. One workaround for this is to use the NVL() function to prevent the selection of NULL values.