Table having nullable columns

Hi all
When you are using business objects for reporting, is it advisable
not to have nullable columns? if so, then why is that?.

I am an oracle developer and one of my friend is working with BO,
but the datawarehouse people wanted to design a warehouse with
tables which cannot have nullable columns, because they are planning
to use BO as reporter.

Please enlighten me :slight_smile:

thanks


koushik7777 (BOB member since 2004-07-05)

BO is not the issue here. It depends on what you’re doing with your data. In general reporting systems work better when you don’t have NULLS in your database. It’s better to have some default values when certain dimensions don’t exist. It simply makes the join process work better.


Steve Krandel :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-25)

The only common instance where no nulls helps in Reporter is when you are using running sums in crosstabs - NULLs will scupper this, whereas zeros will maintain the current value.

Steve is right… Having NULL in one of the foreign key columns of a fact table make a row of fact table to go away.


cpmohanraj :australia: (BOB member since 2002-09-23)