I went to a bank yesterday to inquire why I was receiving mail at my old address despite having moved a number of months ago.  The first thing the representative did was pull up my record to show me that my address was correct in their system.  While that’s very nice, the mail has their [...]

When people ask me how to learn to use a database or how to write SQL queries, I tell them to pick a database system and immerse themselves in it. In fact that advice goes for a lot of software technologies: just immerse yourself in a language, as programming tutorials are easy to come [...]

In Part 1 of The Joy of Null I discussed a variety of ways null-equivalent values make it into the software design. Often times, developer laziness or immutability of the database tier drives many developers to insert values that simulate null values, rather than using a database null itself. In this second half, [...]