MonetDB driver wants an empty string for SQLTables and SQLColumns API calls, where other drivers expect NULL

[monetdb-team]

Date: 2014-06-18 11:31:43 +0200
From: László Sándor <>
To: clients devs <>
Version: 11.17.17 (Jan2014-SP2)

Last updated: 2014-07-31 09:50:27 +0200

Comment 19846

Date: 2014-06-18 11:31:43 +0200
From: László Sándor <>

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2055.2 Safari/537.36
Build Identifier:

Stata fixed how they will talk to the MonetDB driver in the future, but they say the MonetDB driver is less standard, so perhaps we should be aware of this:

We [Stata] were passing a NULL string to the ODBC
api call SQLTables and SQLColumns where the MonetDB driver wants an empty string
(""). Some other drivers need a NULL string passed in to work (Oracle being
one) so I believe this is a driver bug, but I have patched the problem in Stata.
I have added code in -odbc- to check for the MonetDB driver and pass an empty
string in that case.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

As StataCorp investigated this, see above, I skip these steps.

Comment 19859

Date: 2014-06-30 11:49:17 +0200
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset 20d392e6f109 made by Sjoerd Mullender sjoerd@acm.org in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see http//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=20d392e6f109

Changeset description:

Accept NULL pointer in wide character arguments.
This fixes bug #3500.

Comment 19860

Date: 2014-06-30 11:50:08 +0200
From: @sjoerdmullender

It turns out, the problem only occurs in the wide character interfaces. This has now been fixed.