Is making an empty string constant worth it?

Question

I have a co-worker that swears by

//in a singleton \"Constants\" class
public static final String EMPTY_STRING = \"\";

in a constants class

Answer 1

If you every wish to store "empty" strings in a nullable string column in oracle, you will have to change the definition of EMPTY_STRING to be something other than ""! (I recall from the last time I was forced to use Oracle that it does not know the difference between an empty string and a null string).

However this should be done in your data access layer so the rest of the app does not know about it, and/or sort out your data model so you don’t need to store empty string AND null strings in the same column.