Susan Harkins
ssharkins at gmail.com
Mon Mar 16 10:57:24 CDT 2009
How do you reconcile the null item list with the actual data? The null list is text: Unknown, Not Applicable, and so on, but a social security number field is going to expect 9 digits, even if it's a text field, most will require those 9 digits -- how are you going to get around the other "best practice" issues for data entry and validation? Susan H. > kudos, That is an excellent example! but I would think that this > example > would not justify nulls but enforce the odd -1 rule, ie, marking items as > unknown. When was the last time you were allowed to leave an area of the > medical form just blank? there is always an entry for -other-; data > entry > systems also generally allow for the unmistakable -other/unknown- field. > > it seems to make more sense to people than simply not filling out an area > of > the form. > > > -Francisco > http://sqlthis.blogspot.com | Tsql and More... > > > On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 8:06 AM, Susan Harkins <ssharkins at gmail.com> > wrote: > >> A hospital is a good example -- you can have a patient in the system, but >> not know anything about them, not even their name! >> >> If you're really worried about nulls, you can force users to choose from >> a >> set of null items: None, Unknown, and so on, which further forces >> problems >> because you're forcing a data type, regardless of how you fill it. >> >> Susan H. >> >> >> I was simply giving an example of how such a join might look. Also, I >> thought it would be odd for a company to hire an employee w/o already >> having >> a position to fill, generally I've never seen this to be true, but >> possibly >> does happen, just haven't ran into it myself. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> dba-SQLServer mailing list >> dba-SQLServer at databaseadvisors.com >> http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver >> http://www.databaseadvisors.com >> >> > _______________________________________________ > dba-SQLServer mailing list > dba-SQLServer at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver > http://www.databaseadvisors.com >