[perl4ever]

"I mean, what's not to love about conflating "this field intentionally left blank" with "no certain value could be obtained for this field"

Well, probably because Oracle was the first database I used a lot, it just seems natural to me and Microsoft's distinction between the empty string and null is annoying.

On the other hand, if I were to try to rationally defend Oracle's way of doing it, it would be something along these lines:

You can subdivide the concept of "this field doesn't have a normal value" into an infinite number of reasons. So if you're not going to have zero "null-like" options, and you're not going to have one, then where does it stop? When you have two, or three, or four, etc. that seems like you've gone down the wrong path no matter how good your intentions are. It vaguely reminds me of the "zero, one, infinity" rule.