title: Oracle Date Column NULL
body: <p>I am new to Oracle and I have ran into a problem.  I have a form on my page that has a START_DATE and END_DATE, and I need to compare these values to their corresponding StartDate and EndDate columns in the DB.  These columns are nullable so I am erroring out.  What are the different ways around this?  Using ToDate is not going to work easily because I am currently using a Filter class to build my query so I was looking for other options.</p>