doco
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In response to: http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=131593
I personally believe 'NULL' should be banned as a possibility entirely.
It has been pounded into my head that 'NULL' is not the same as 'EMPTY' or 'ZERO'; and that it literally means 'NOT KNOWN'. Now consider a contact database that has a field for lets say Apt# or Street Direction such as N or S or ?? as an example. There are many, many instances where these fields would be left blank or empy: NULL | NOT KNOWN. When in fact the situation is known: the object has no such attribute; and in query or some other form of program logic the venerable NZ(subject, response) function may be used which would replace the NULL with a value. Or program logic and or error trapping would be used to handle such occasions. Which is an absurd waste of time and talent IMHO.
Therefore, if there is no applicable attribute to enter (something known) why not say so with 'N/A'? Else what we are saying by using 'NULL' is that we are building a dataset containing data that cannot be known. Kind of like saying
I personally believe 'NULL' should be banned as a possibility entirely.

It has been pounded into my head that 'NULL' is not the same as 'EMPTY' or 'ZERO'; and that it literally means 'NOT KNOWN'. Now consider a contact database that has a field for lets say Apt# or Street Direction such as N or S or ?? as an example. There are many, many instances where these fields would be left blank or empy: NULL | NOT KNOWN. When in fact the situation is known: the object has no such attribute; and in query or some other form of program logic the venerable NZ(subject, response) function may be used which would replace the NULL with a value. Or program logic and or error trapping would be used to handle such occasions. Which is an absurd waste of time and talent IMHO.
Therefore, if there is no applicable attribute to enter (something known) why not say so with 'N/A'? Else what we are saying by using 'NULL' is that we are building a dataset containing data that cannot be known. Kind of like saying
This statement is FALSE