Re: Pet Peeves?

From: Steve Crawford <scrawford(at)pinpointresearch(dot)com>
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Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Pet Peeves?
Date: 2009-01-29 17:35:53
Message-ID: 4981E8F9.4030402@pinpointresearch.com
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>> 3. Date handling
>> Sometimes I've got data with invalid dates and it would be great if it
>> could replace all the bad ones with, say "0000-00-00".
>>

Oh dear $DEITY, no. Part of the ethos of PostgreSQL is that it requires
you to enter valid data. I don't see how auto-replacing one invalid date
with a standardized different invalid date is a benefit.

In a data-cleaning environment, I could see some limit benefit of some
sort of explicit override on the copy command, say:
\copy foo (a, b, c invalid=null, d invalid='') from foo.txt...

At least you could get the good data into a table to analyze it. But
overall, the data-cleaning role seems to me to belong more in the ETL arena.

-Steve

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