the result takes its charset/collation
attributes from the character string,
e.g.  SELECT func(NULL, _latin2'string')
now returns a latin2 result. This is
done by introducing a new derivation
(aka coercibility) level DERIVATION_IGNORABLE,
which is used with Item_null.
2. 'Pure' NULL is now BINARY(0), not CHAR(0).
I.e. NULL is now more typeless.