A question of principle

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.

I would appreciate any and all opinions. Am I being too uncompromising? (If it's of any use, we are using the star-join modelling technique as opposed to normalization.) Does anyone else out there allow only blanks to be entered into a field? If so, how is it working? Anyone out there replace blanks with nulls where there were already blanks? If so, did you have trouble teaching the users the concept of null values?

Thanks to any and all who have input on this!

--brad skiles Received on Wed Oct 23 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST