On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 12:46:50PM -0400, Randy Chrismon wrote: > an exort from a Lotus Notes database. At some point, the MySQL > documentation says that a table with no nullable columns is > better/faster than one with. The Lotus Notes database I'm migrating, > however, has many fields with no values. I infer from the MySQL > documentation that I'm better off doing: > > create table my_table(a_field varchar(16) NOT NULL default "", ...) > > and exporting my values from Notes as "" rather than using NULL.
No. The meaning of NULL is defined in the SQL specification; it means "not known" or "not applicable". If you have data that is missing because it is not known or not applicable, then use NULL. A zero-length string has no defined meaning. I've done maintenance on databases that contained zero-length strings, and they were nightmares. I can't think of any reason why you would use a zero-length string in a database. Bob Hall -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
