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Whatever one developer may do with null, another may do
with control and status fields.
Well there are actually two questions here, no? The first is how should
you represent that the employee is still employed, the second is, what
should you do with the terminated-date column while the employee is
still employed.
In the first case, I'm all in favor of a status column to indicate the
employment status. In the second case, when there is no value for a
column I'm a favor of "filling it" with null.
To me (and many others, but granted not everyone) that's what null is
for, it's for saying "there is no value for this column". I'm not in
favor of saying "if the term date is null the employee is still
employed." That to me is an odd use of the term-date column.
Also keep in mind, there is a practical issue here too. Many systems
(including query and ETL tools) understand that 'null' means something
special, specifically that there is no value for the column. If you
decide to load up the date column with 0001-01-01 then you'll have to
special case a lot of code that would otherwise just understand that
there was no value for that column.
-Walden
midrange.com
