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Recent Blog Comments By Eric Howe

• Why NULL Values Should Not Be Used in a Database Unless Required

  Posted on Mar 19, 2010 at 12:10 PM

  @Ben Nadel, Are you saying that correct data doesn't have any business value? Nonsense. What about referential integrity and foreign keys?... read more »

• Why NULL Values Should Not Be Used in a Database Unless Required

  Posted on Jul 18, 2009 at 10:27 PM

  @Ben: You said "There are certainly times when they should and have to be used; a binary tree might be a great example of place where it should be used (although I'd probably argue that a parent node ID of zero would / should indicate no parent just as well as NULL would)." I... read more »

• Why NULL Values Should Not Be Used in a Database Unless Required

  Posted on Jul 11, 2009 at 3:56 PM

  @Ben, I'm not talking about dates in particular, I'm talking about NULL in general. For example: say you have a blog/article/page/... that can have a comment thread but doesn't necessarily need one. In the database you will have "blog.comment_thread" FK'ed to "commen... read more »

• Why NULL Values Should Not Be Used in a Database Unless Required

  Posted on Jul 9, 2009 at 10:55 PM

  Has no here heard of foreign key or unique constraints? You get away with FKs and NOT NULL by forcing the foreign table to have a special reserved value which means "not there" but that's a horrible kludge that will keep on giving and giving. However, without NULL you can't have have... read more »