Re: nulls in databasae design

jared still wrote:
>
> On Fri, 09 Jan 1998 13:39:54 -0500, Tom Kearney <tkearne1_at_erols.com> wrote:
>
> <SNIP>
>
> >A different problem: in another case, we HAD to use NULLs for many
> >fields that should have been NOT NULL. A high level manager decided to
> >use FoxPro to create some applications against our Oracle tables (don't
> >ask why!), using ODBC. But, ODBC (or at least the version they used)
> >limited the number of characters allowed per SQL statement. So when new
> >records were created, all the values couldn't be supplied in one
> >statement. So they had to CREATE a row with some values and then UPDATE
> >it with the others. Many columns had to be NULL for this operation to
> >work. (Other work arounds could have been proposed, but dropping the
> >NOT NULLs was considered the most expedient).
> >
> >Regards,
> >Tom
>
> Sounds like a case of the tail wagging the dog. ;-)

Instead of allowing the extra columns to have NULL values, why didn't you just use default values. Create table allows you to setup default values for each column. Received on Thu Jan 15 1998 - 00:00:00 CST