aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
michael@stripped wrote:
>> On Fri, 13 Mar 2009, michael@stripped 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.
>
