Re: A question of principle

Bard (bwskiles_at_adpc.purdue.edu) wrote:
> I am a DBA. We have several developers working with our setup of Oracle
> Data Warehouses. The source of our data is a mainframe.
 

> The question of principle has to do with transferring mainframe practices
> to the Oracle warehouse. Primarily, the use of "blanks" or "spaces" in
> place of NULLs. I am, on principle, opposed to using blanks where nulls
> ought to be. I find the blanks to be misleading and a misuse of Oracle. I
> also believe it sets a poor precedence for future Oracle applications.

Another question to consider is the space overhead of padding with blanks. A 50 character column with an average data length of around 20 characters will be very expensive to blank pad in a table with a non-trivial number of rows.

Having large average row sizes will also increase your exposure to data storage issues such as row chaining and migration.

--

Greg.
---------------------------------------------------
All hail the three great virtues of the programmer:
Laziness, impatience and hubris.

echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln256%Pln256/snlbx]sb3135071790101768542287578439snlbxq'|dc