Valued Predicates
Valued predicates is my term for a set of related unary Boolean predicates that return TRUE or FALSE based on a property of their argument.
17.1 IS NULL
It is the only way to test to see if an expression is NULL or not, and it has been in SQL-86 and all later versions of the standard. The SQL-92 Standard extended it to accept <row value constructor> instead of a single column or scalar expression.
This extended version will start showing up in implementations when other row expressions are allowed. If all the values in the row R are the NULL value, then R IS NULL is TRUE; otherwise, it is FALSE. If none of the values in R are NULL value, R IS NOT NULL is TRUE; otherwise, ...
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