Nat Luengnaruemitchai

The only substantial difference I've noticed so far is that if you put a null value in SqlParameter, it is as though the parameter did not exist (so it had better be optional), but if you put in DBNull.Value, the parameter is included with a null value.

Oh, and there's the COM interop thing with VT_NULL and VT_EMPTY, which was itself kind of pointless and chaotic.

And have you noticed that contrary to the docs, and contrary to SQL as well, DBNull.Value.Equals(DBNull.Value) is true?

DBNull always seemed pretty pointless to me. I hope someone knows why it's there.

Because value types such as int are not nullable.

But you can use "null" can't you?

Because Microsoft sucks eggs. They wrote methods like getString() that throw exceptions if they encounter null values. Why not box it in an Integer object instead of making me write tons of extra code? I just extended the reader class and wrote methods that use boxing types.