Re: A97 - what would you do 99 times out of a hundred?

Good points you make here. I'll have to go back and look
for posts by the cd theory guys. That one escaped me
completely (not unusual, BTW).
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On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 15:12:27 -0230, Tim Marshall
<TIMMY!@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>MLH wrote:
>
>> You have a table - tblOwners. Two of its fields are
>> strOwnrFName and strOwnrLName.
>>
>> Would you make the default value "" (ZLS) most
>> of the time?
>
>Based on your example of the dogs, I think you have issues confused
>here, ML - see my response to you after Lyle's "Spouse" example.
>
>However, to deal with this particular question, I will depart from
>others. I prefer to NOT have any null values in any field (except for
>dates, where I haven't figured out exactly a means by which to
>substitute an undefined value). My reason for this is based largely on
>an interesting cross over discussion from the cd.theory guys a couple of
>years ago in which this was discussed with religious ferver... 8)
>
>ANyway, using null values to identify undefined values means that
>indexes cannot be used to find the undefined values.
>
>Thus, for a numeric key that is used to join tables together, I prefer a
>default value of 0, such as in the case of your dog found table and
>owner table - dog found table has a 0 instead of any other number in the
>foreign key field for the owner table.
>
>Similarly, I populate undefined or unpopulated text fields with an empty
>string. It's my opinion (and I emphasize MY opinion) that the use of
>null here is not appropriate.
>
>The explanation by others in this thread who have replied (all of whom I
>greatly respect as being heads and shoulders above me in Jet experience,
>BTW) describing their use of null for an undefined text value sounds to
>me as no different as a zero length string. The difference being a zero
>length string is stored in a table's indexes, while a null is not.

.

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