Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> So how is a missing value in a column represented?

Explained in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19641060

> > Functions in SQL can return NULL to signal an error condition.

> That's plain wrong. functions in SQL signal errors by throwing an exception

Well, just as an example: take a look at the 'to_number()' function. It will happily return NULL if the format string is an empty string. An empty format is an error condition (it's not documented to return NULL, btw, see [1]) at least in some contexts, so the returned NULL breaking the query can be very unintuitive.

So yes, throwing an exception is what happens in 99% of situations, until you hit a weird case where a NULL is returned unexpectedly for you. And I'm not saying that returning NULL is bad for 'to_number()'; in SQL that's OK. It's just not how we approach things in EdgeQL.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/functions-formatting.html




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: