Re: NULLs and stuff

[Philip Stoev]

> After original value to key conversion with makeKey, transform
>
> NULL => zero length key
> Zero length key (e.g empty string) => 0x00
> Keys in form of 0x00<something> => 0x00 0x00 <something>
>
>
> This seems to retain the original sorting when keys for memcmp based
> comparison and making NULL less then everything else.
> I think this fixed lot of issues. But,  if we go for it, we need to issue 
> a
> big red "warning, incompatible change" in the release notes
> Luckily we're still alpha and I think we can allow us to make such changes
> without writing a conversion utility.

Correct me if I am wrong, however Jim's design allows for a database version 
counter that we can increment in order to handle older tablespaces the way 
we handled them previously and handle new tablespaces the new way.

Philip Stoev