Any reason to use sql.NullString rather than *string?

[Hǎiliàng]

Doc says that Null* types in database/sql are introduced to support nullable value, but I have also tried to use *string, *int and *time.Time and it turns out that they can also be stored and retrieved from database and represents null.

Is there any reason to use these sql.Null* types rather than pointers to primitive types?

Hǎiliàng

[Julien Schmidt]

No this doesn't work. For example you can't assign nil to an int var http://play.golang.org/p/HmrSPO1mbR

How else should you return the nil value? Set the pointer address to nil?

[Russ Cox]

There's no effective difference. We thought people might want to use NullString because it is so common and perhaps expresses the intent more clearly than *string. But either will work.

Russ