Live from the JavaOne conference again, this time attending a session about enhancements to the JDBC specification 4.1. Four members of the JDBC specification team have presented a number of useful enhancements due in the upcoming version of JDBC. Some of these features may not make it into 4.1, but will be in future versions [...]

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, I’ll talk [...]

Often in the database world, you do not have all the information needed to create a record. For example, you may have a person’s full name but not their middle name or initial, or you might be missing their date of birth. In such cases, the recommended solution is to fill that field with a [...]