A recent thread on pgsql-hackers warrants some more extensive discussion. In the past, I’ve criticized NULL semantics, but in this post I’d just like to explain some corner cases that I think you’ll find interesting, and try to straighten out some myths and misconceptions.
First off, I’m strictly discussing SQL NULL here. SQL NULL is peculiar in a number of ways, and the general excuse for this is that there is a need to represent “missing information” — which may be true. But there are lots of ways to represent missing information, as I pointed out in a previous post, and SQL’s approach to missing information is, well, “unique”.