One of the trickiest aspects of relational database management can be dealing with missing information. The standard method of representing missing information is to set the “value” to null. A null ...

It's time to meet the Guideline Support Library, a small helper library that provides some missing functionality. I'll show you how to ensure a pointer is never null, which will make your applications ...

clauses IN and EXISTS are interchangeable. However, they’re quite different in how they handle NULL values and may give different results. The problem comes from the fact that, in an Oracle database, ...

In this SQL Server tip, Arthur Fuller explains the effects of NULLs, and the different results obtained by inner and outer JOINs. SQL Server developers must understand two things: the difference ...

Take advantage of the null object pattern in .NET to eliminate the need for null checks and avoid runtime errors in your applications. You might often encounter null reference exceptions in your ...