Unix systems make it easy to make output that you don’t want to see simply disappear. Toss output into the void. Send errors in one direction, useful output in another. Something of a bit bucket, ...

One of the trickiest aspects of relational database management can be dealing with missing information. The standard method of representing missing information is to set the “value” to null. A null ...

When databases are designed, they serve as semantic expressions of the organizations that employ them. Those expressions describe the data items of importance and articulate the business rules as the ...

This article is also available as a PDF download. Where errors are concerned, null values are an equal-opportunity menace. If an unhandled null value doesn’t generate a runtime error, it’ll show up in ...