From owner-pgsql-general@hub.org Fri Oct  9 18:22:09 1998
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Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 18:18:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: Steve Doliov <statsol@statsol.com>
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To: pgsql-general@postgreSQL.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Making NULLs visible.
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On Fri, 9 Oct 1998, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> [Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> > > Yes, \ always outputs as \\, excepts someone changed it last week, and I
> > > am requesting a reversal.  Do you like the \N if it is unique?
> > 
> > Well, it's certainly clear, but could be confused with \n (newline). Can we
> > have \0 instead?
> 
> Yes, but it is uppercase.  \0 looks like an octal number to me, and I
> think we even output octals sometimes, don't we?
> 

my first suggestion may have been hare-brained, but why not just make the
specifics of the output user-configurable.  So if the user chooses \0, so
be it, if the user chooses \N so be it, if the user likes NULL so be it.
but the option would only have one value per database at any given point
in time.  so database x could use \N on tuesday and NULL on wednesday, but
database x could never have two references to the characters(s) used to
represent a null value.

steve




From owner-pgsql-general@hub.org Sun Oct 11 17:31:08 1998
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Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1998 16:28:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Thomas Good <tomg@admin.nrnet.org>
To: pgsql-general@postgreSQL.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Making NULLs visible.
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Watching all this go by...as a guy who has to move alot of data
from legacy dbs to postgres, I've gotten used to \N being a null.

My vote, if I were allowed to cast one, would be to have one null 
and that would be the COPY command null.  I have no difficulty
distinguishing a null from a newline...

At the pgsql command prompt I would find seeing \N rather reassuring.
I've seen alot of these little guys.

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