> 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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