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On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 12:22 PM, Musselman, Paul
<pmusselman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
One of the rules of database design is 'only use a field for 1 purpose.' Dates of 00/00/00 and 99/99/99 are flags meaning something other than a date!
There should have been fields for 'never expires' and 'no date provided.' I think that would go hand in hand with null values for the date field... but what do you do if you can't have nulls??
It could be reasonably argued that these are simply sentinel values,
and as such they *should* be in the same field. Indeed, I am sure it
is common for folks to just use 0001-01-01 and 9999-12-31 (i.e. *LOVAL
and *HIVAL, respectively) instead of all zeros and all nines.
In RPG, each null-capable column in a table *is* effectively two
fields in your program. I don't have much charitable to say about
null-handling in RPG, but I will say that its design definitely does
not encourage the creation of null-capable fields.
John Y.
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