> 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. -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=arch...@jab.org
