aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
mich...@j3ksolutions.com wrote:
On Fri, 13 Mar 2009, mich...@j3ksolutions.com wrote:
Explanation(5): The more you understand how the database is to be used,
and the more complexity and thought you put into your database design,
the
less complex it will be to retrieve reliable information out of it.
Furthermore, (and this is probably what makes me crazy when Nulls are
evolved) after a ten year stretch of software development, where I and a
team designed our own databases, I did a nine year stretch of
statistical
programming, using databases designed by other people, and Nulls in the
data made the results unpredictable, and yeah, made me crazy! I had to
write nightly processes to resolve inconsistencies in the data, if at
least report inconsistencies. You know the old saying "Garbage in =
Garbage out", to me Nulls are garbage, and if there is a good reason for
nulls to be a part of good clean data then someone please help me
understand that.
Hi
I'm in a argumentative mood today too. :-)
I have a database logging weather data. When a station does not report a
temperature, it is set to NULL. It would be a very bad idea to set it to 0
as this would ruin the whole statistics.
NULL is a perfectly valid information in many cases.
Cheers
Thomas
OK! I do understand, thank you.
But hypothetically speaking, what value would you use if you didn't have a
"I don't what this is" value like null?
I ask this because I started programming when NULL was really zero, and
part of the ASCII collating sequence.
I'd use -99999.9999, I'd never allow a "i don't know what it is" value
like Null in my database.
Mike.
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