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Posted by Doug on 07/07/91 11:42
Very interesting question. The answer is "it depends."
As a general rule, I'll leave money as null usually. My logic is that
if a dollar amount is unknown, that is different then the dollar amount
zero, and i probably need to deal with the unknowns wherever and
whenever the amounts are shown to teh end user. This leads to
interesting discussions with the users, as you get to explain to them
the issues, and ask them what they want the defaults to be, or whether
they want to skip the data, and how they want the reports to be
documented.
For text fields, I will usually convert to ' '. Olap likes that
better. Sometimes I will convert nulls to 'BLANK'. Just kind of
depends.
Dates need to stay null. A null date is the easiest thing to deal
with.
Does this answer your questions? Are you doing OLAP? You might try
creating a cube with your denormalized data. OLAP is pretty neat for
datawarehouses where users want to extract data.
Regards,
Doug
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