Re: Oracle NULL vs '' revisited

On Aug 31, 1:52 pm, "Shakespeare" <what..._at_xs4all.nl> wrote:
> "Brian Peasland" <d..._at_nospam.peasland.net> schreef in berichtnews:46d7157b$0$16321$88260bb3_at_free.teranews.com...
>
> > Tony Rogerson wrote:
> >>> No. If the key changes, it is a new book! Keys can not change! (Want a
> >>> new car? Get a new licence plate!)
>
> > In the state I live in, when you get a new car, you put your old license
> > plates on the new car (assuming you traded your old car in on the new
> > purchase).
>
> Then it must be the same car! ;-) (In my country, plates belong to the
> car, not to the driver and stay on the car when sold)

In California it works both ways. If you just get a regular series license plate, it goes with the car. If you get a special series, such as a vanity plate (a number of varieties), handicapped, environmental, olympic, horseless carriage (my friends have one on a '67 big-block Vette), shortwave radio (and a bunch of others), you own the plate and it goes with you. With a more recently enacted exception about keeping plates not on a car (some people were hoarding, just as some people sat on domain names). And you can also buy old plates and put them on cars, as long as you have a pair. Oddly, it is illegal to restore damaged plates, although there are a number of businesses that do. All these things and more helped contribute to a famous high-cost computer upgrade failure. Later, there was a scandal because Oracle wanted to sell a site-license to the entire state government (which would have been a great idea, in my opinion).

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> >> So, a membership database - my user group (sqlserverfaq.com) for
> >> instance; I only capture this information because it's all I need and by
> >> law in the UK I can only capture what I need...
>
> >> Full Name
> >> Email Address
> >> Company
> >> Country of residence
>
> >> What's the natural key?
>
> >> Email Address is unique at a point in time.
>
> >> Are you trying to tell me email address does not change? What happens
> >> when you move companies? You'd want to update your email address, in your
> >> data model you aren't allowed to do that so I guess you can't use Oracle.
>
> > Don't let the politician's in the US hear about this one. Next thing you
> > know, they'll pass a law that says you can take your email address with
> > you...similar to the law for cell phone numbers.
>
> Yeah, Transportable Email Addresses!
> By the way, this is a real problem: I registered for some sites, support
> etc. with my company email address and switched jobs. Lost all my electronic
> certificates on Oracle Education for example..... I hate sites using email
> address as a user id.
>

Funnily enough, my @home address was given to me years ago when I signed up for cable, and then went away when the home.com domain went to Japan. I was too stubborn to stop using it... :-)

Since I have my own domains, I've taken to signing up for things with the name of the site or worse. That really confuses support people at times. Even my latest SR had a comment about a bad email address... Oracle seems to be able to send some things to my domain but not others. And I just caught costco spamming long after unsubscribing from something, I know because I used fuckyou in the address. After complaining, I got a "Dear fuckyou" letter from their support.

jg

--
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