When the Sybase Wire Protocol driver establishes a connection, the driver sets the Sybase database option ansinull to on. Setting ansinull to on ensures that the driver is compliant with the ANSI SQL standard, which makes developing cross-database applications easier.
By default, Sybase does not evaluate NULL values in SQL equality (=), inequity (<>), or aggregate function comparisons in an ANSI SQL-compliant manner. For example, the ANSI SQL specification defines that
col1=NULL always evaluates to false:
Setting ansinull to on changes the default database behavior so that SQL statements must use
IS NULL instead of
=NULL. For example, using the Sybase Wire Protocol driver, if the value of col1 in the following statement is NULL, the comparison evaluates to true: