Re: NULLs in SQR/PeopleSoft.

[James Womeldorf <jwomeldo@FASTENAL.COM>]

I'm not 100% certain, but I bet it is because somewhere out there, there is
a database that does not support nulls, and PS tries to work on as many
databases as possible.

I expect that database limitation is the reason there is a size limit on the
source SQL for views, too.  (it is fairly large, but I have hit the top at
times)

Jim Womeldorf
Programmer/Analyst
Fastenal Company
jwomeldo@fastenal.com
(507) 453-8250


-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Rabinovich [mailto:odecca25@YAHOO.COM]
Sent: Friday, July 19, 2002 9:29 AM
To: SQR-USERS@list.iex.net
Subject: NULLs in SQR/PeopleSoft.


This may not be 100% SQR relevant question, however
the fact that PeopleSoft creates tables with most of
its fields having Not Null constraints makes them very
difficult to use in SQRs for Updates/Inserts.

Does anyone know why PeopleSoft creates tables with
Not Null constraints on most of its columns?

This practice leads to very inconvenient coding in
SQR, such as checking variables for NULLs prior to
Insert/Update, and then forcing a blank into character
fields and zeros into numeric fields.  However 0 and '
' are not NULLs and sometimes no value is the only
valid value for the field.

In order to circumvent this problem, we have created a
procedure that joins DBA_CONS_COLUMNS and PSKEYDEFN to
drop constraints on non-key fields.  This has saved us
a lot of trouble and coding, especially on the tables
where we insert/update a huge number of fields, some
of which could potentially be NULL.

Has anyone approached this problem differently?


Greg Rabinovich
Altitude Consulting


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