Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gxt 518 days ago
This has always made queries unpredictable in many scenarios and it should be a feature to turn nulls off entirely and swap them out with Option<T> instead.
1 comments

How would you handle unmatched outer joins?
By having a default value (non-null) for each declared type of those columns.

Or, the user must define a default value in the query itself.

Yes, tedious; but, precise and forces the programmer to really prepare for the "unknown" scenario.

a left outer join b yields tuples of (A, Option<B>), a full outer join b yields tuples of (Option<A>, Option<B>)