Do we need control for each column? What if we go with preferring NULL for comma-comma, and then print warnings for NOT NULL columns and try the promote. If you want comma-comma to be zero-length string, you can create the column with NOT NULL, load the file, then ALTER TABLE to allow NULL's again. Basically, the NOT NULL specification on the column is the COPY CSV control method, rather than having it be in COPY.
If we can't do type specific stuff then we need to be able to have column-specific controls on export, at least.
Consider a text column containing US 5-digit ZIP codes. If they are not quoted, a spreadsheet will almost certainly not preserve the leading zero some of them have, producing very undesirable results. However, a genuine numeric-type field must not be quoted, or the same spreadsheet won't see that value as a number. Unless we do stuff based on type, we have no way of knowing from the text representation of the data what we really need. Thus my proposal from this morning for column-specific user control over this aspect. And if we are going to have per column user control on export, why not on import too, to handle the NOT NULL problem? It might make life easier for us code-wise than chasing down nullability (e.g. in domains).
cheers
andrew
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