Sure you have nulls when there is a left join with no matching rows and we deal with that right in the SQL statement that does the join. By the time my app sees the data there are no nulls.
I have lots of stuff out there, both VFP and .NET , of my own where everything that isn't a PK is nullable. I don't do a lot of statistical calcs and that sort of thing so I don't have to think about it much as both the framework I use handle nulls with ease.
But my understanding is that in corporate IT - at least at Dow and S&P nulls are seen as trouble waiting to happen and aren't popular.
My suggestion was just that all the other Ronin consultants out there learn to be flexible about either environment.
>>>>>And if you don't define as what it is you will have problems.
>>>
>>>I'll only have problems if I allow it to exist.
>>>There are no NULLS in any column in any row in any table I've ever designed and created, period.
>>>If I run into them in other people's data, I mutter the unutterable and deal with them.
>>
>>Whatever the merits or demerits my suggestion would be that hired gun programmers learn to deal with databases like the ones you describe. In my experience they are ubiquitous and one needs to be able to program against them and submit scripts that honor the prohibition against nulls.
>>
>>I know that in the hundreds of tables I deal with every day in dozens of databases in a fairly large enterprise there are no null columns in production, period.
>
>I do not understand the issue with nulls (and yes, I've bitten by them once, I even posted a message here not long time ago for an issue with a SELECT IN where I forgot about the null and did not get the expected results, but I blame myself), I think of them as very elegant, but I am digressing, the fact that there are no nulls stored in your tables does not mean that you are free of nulls, as Fabio pointed out long time ago (one of the first messages in the thread that went largely ignored) for at least you have nulls when you do ~INNER JOINS (LEFT, RIGHT, FULL), and this might be part of a view, so I wonder what you guys do with them? I think it is more cumbersome to find a work-around for this than just plainly embrace the use of NULLS <g>
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
