FreeTDS Development Group

[galt AT folkplanet.com]

Rats, the emailer re-formatted my text layout, I'll try again:

If you gave freebcp a way to express nulls, e.g. 

-Null '' (equivalent to what happens now)

-Null '"NULL"' (actually this is probably not a useful example) 

-Null 'NULL' (great for csv) -Null '\N' (great for mysql with custom 
field/line separator strings)

etc, then the user could get what he needs.


On Mar 31 2006, galt AT folkplanet.com wrote:

> It would be nice to be able to say how the NULL value
> should be expressed. Currently it looks like 
> an unquoted empty string, i.e. if your separator is 
> <my#$#@separator><my#$#@separator>.  
>
> MySQL 5 load data local infile will give a bunch of 
> warnings with scary messages like out of range value
> and data truncated.  For CSV, it would like to see
> unquoted NULL (i.e. the only thing that ISN'T quoted), 
> and for special separator strings (non-csv), it wants it to 
> be escaped as \N.  
>
> If you gave freebcp a way to express nulls, e.g. -Null '' (equivalent to 
> what happens now) -Null '"NULL"' (actually this is probably not a useful 
> example) -Null 'NULL' (great for csv) -Null '\N' (great for mysql with 
> custom field/line separator strings) etc, then the user could get what he 
> needs.
>
> Right now I am having to write a custom program to do 
> this because sed is bombing out on big input files
> (several tables around 6GB).
>
> Plus, even then, it will end up turning all "" into NULL.
>
> -Galt
>
>
>
> On Mar 31 2006, Bort, Paul wrote:
>
> > > 
> > > Ahem.  I understand they're technically different, of course, 
> > > but how are
> > > they semantically different?  Which user can tell the 
> > > difference between a
> > > null field and a zero-length string?  And what is the 
> > > difference between
> > > an empty field and a field that's empty?  
> > > 
> > 
> > Just a quick example from my current project of how '' and NULL are
> > different and that difference can be important:
> > 
> > We have a table that holds user settings, and a null ( or a missing row
> > ) means that the default (from a separate table) should be used. OTOH,
> > if the column is an empty string, that means that the setting should be
> > an empty string, even if the default says otherwise. If a setting is a
> > file prefix, an empty string is a reasonable value.
> > 
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> > 
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