NULL is Not The Billion Dollar Mistake. A Counter-Rant
A short while ago, I gave this answer on Quora. The question was “What is the significance of NULL in SQL?” and most of the existing answers went on about citing C.J. Date or Tony Hoare and unanimously declared NULL as “evil”.
Of course, academics like C.J. Date will rant about NULL (see Greg Kemnitz’s interesting answer on Quora). Let me remind you that C.J. Date also ranted about UNION ALL, as pure relational theory operates only on sets, not on bags (like SQL does). While in theory, sets are probably much purer than bags, in practice, bags are just very useful.
These people probably also still mourn over the fact that SQL (useful) won over QUEL (pure), and I don’t blame them. Theory is always more beautiful than the real world, which is exposed to real world requirements.
There are also other kinds of purists who will run about and educate everyone about their black/white opinions that leave no room to “it depends…” pragmatic approaches. I like to display this witty comic strip for such occasions: New intern knows best: GOTO. Purists like extreme abstraction when they describe their world, and such abstraction asks for very simple models, no complexity. NULL adds tremendous complexity to the SQL “model”, and does thus not fit their view.
