On 23 Sep 2012, at 11:37am, Baruch Burstein <bmburst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am curious about the usefulness of sqlite's "unique" type handling, and > so would like to know if anyone has ever actually found any practical use > for it/used it in some project? I am referring to the typeless handling, I use it in a project where a number could be missing for a number of different reasons, each of which have to be handled differently. So I have just one column in and test for NULL and several string values before I treat any other value as a number. But had SQLite not had typeless handling I would just have made two columns: one with a text value and one with a number, and the number would be valid only if the text column had, say, 'valid' in. It would have just meant writing my code a little differently. Another time was not in everyday working code, but when I imported a huge set of data from a spreadsheet which sometimes had weird values in the cells. Normally this requires a lot of clicking going backwards and forwards between two documents. A normal SQL engine would have just left many cells blank, but with SQLite it was possible to import the entire spreadsheet in one go, then I didn't have to work with the spreadsheet any more and could just do things like SELECT * FROM deposits WHERE typeof(amount) IS NOT 'integer' to find the cells with weird values and bit by bit convert them to something useful. In that case, once the data was all in a form I was happy with, I no longer needed the typeless nature of SQLite: my everyday code assumed that that column was integer or NULL. Simon. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
