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RE: Counterquestion - is Oracle a He or a She - or an It or a hermaphrodite

From: Kennedy, Jim <jim_kennedy_at_mentor.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 08:46:21 -0700
Message-ID: <EF25DB6D87DD1A469C80A312C63C3B4C0426DF20@SVR-ORW-EXC-07.mgc.mentorg.com>

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Leandro Guimaraes Faria C. Dutra [mailto:ldutra_at_toyota.com.br] Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 8:29 AM
To: Kennedy, Jim
Cc: Niall Litchfield; oracle-l_at_freelists.org; oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org; psinger1_at_chartermi.net Subject: RE: Counterquestion - is Oracle a He or a She - or an It or a hermaphrodite

oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org gravou em 2005-08-08 12:29:28:

> No, NULLS mean no data.

        Sorry to break it to you, but it's funny to see you unwittingly

confirming my point... no data can be interpreted in lots of ways.

--

Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
Administrador de Bases de Dados      +55 (11) 4390 5383
Toyota do Brasil Ltda              ldutra_at_toyota.com.br
São Bernardo do Campo, SP                        BRASIL



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People are free to interprate anything anyway they want to.(regarless of the existance or not existance of nulls, if we had surgaflate the problem would be the same - How to indicate when you have no information.)  If you laid all the economists end to end you would never reach a conclusion.  

But no, NULL means there is no information.  A perfectly valid piece of information!  If the requirements are that we must not have "no information" then make it NOT NULL for that column. (a very reasonable requirement)

My point was that a lot of people have trouble understanding what NULLs are.  In my example, (a real case) it was made clear why you needed to have the instance when you don't know if the person has an allergy or not or if they were never asked the question (no data, null). eg The information was imported from a billing or scheduling system and that system isn't going to know that type of medical information.  Which was the situation - why making the column not null in this case wasn't going to work and why one could not assume a value because that could have severe medical reprocussions.

Jim
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Received on Mon Aug 08 2005 - 10:48:23 CDT

Original text of this message

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