NULL COLLATION IN ORACLE 8

IS THERE ANY WAY TO TRIGGER LOW COLLATION OF NULLS IN ORACLE (Maybe an environment variable). eg. select * from table order by column2 - where table contains 3 records:
A NULL
A XXXX
B NULL

displays:

A XXXX
A NULL
B NULL

but required order is (As per INFORMIX):
A NULL
A XXX
B NULL

NOTE: Obviously this is a simplified case

Remember Oracle is a Relational Data Base, this means, quering data from a table does not retrieve always same order, so if you query 100 times a table, maybe you get 99% times same order and just 1% any others and that is OK.

Try order by col1, nvl(col2, low_value)

In your example, if it is character data, then the lowest value is 'a', so use

order by col1, nvl(col2, 'a')

HTH

David.