#TALK

Meet NULL the UNKNOWN

Laetitia Avrot

NULL in SQL is a pretty tricky concept. Wether you think you know it all or you admit that you could learn some things about it, come see this talk!

After some explanations, this session will turn into a crazy quiz and I challenge you to achieve a faultless performance!

Tech

Of course, you know everything you need to know about NULL in SQL! Well, are you sure ?

NULL and three-valued logic are often misunderstood and can induce poor written queries, wrong written queries (when the result is not as expected) and a lot of time lost trying to figure out what your missing colleague wanted to do with such a tricky and bad-twisted SQL code.

After defining NULL and UNKNOWN (and you'll see that it's not so simple), we'll go through different use cases where 3-valued is used, what pit you don't want to fall into and how you can improve query writing, now that you fully understand what's behind NULL in SQL. The queries will be run under PostgreSQL, as it is the most SQL-compliant RDBMS.

Laetitia Avrot

Lætitia Avrot est Field CTO pour EDB. Elle a commencé son aventure Postgres en 2007. Elle a rapidement dû apprendre aussi le métier de DBA Oracle et SQL Server. Elle s'est beaucoup amusée sur des projets à fortes contraintes de haute disponibilité, des pannes en production, la mise en place de plan de reprise d'activité, la répartition de charge, les données géographiques... Elle est impliquée dans la communauté en tant que trésorière de PostgreSQL Europe, co-fondatrice de Postgres Women et contributrice reconnue du projet PostgreSQL.