Re: Blank, nullable date column rejected by psql

On 2/11/19 4:44 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
> Running postgresql-10.5 on Slackware-14.2.
>
> A table has a column defined as
>
> Column       | Type  | Collation | Nullable | Default
> next_contact | date  |           |          |
>
> In a .sql file to insert rows in this table psql has a problem when there's
> no value for the next_contact column:
>
> $ psql -f activities.sql -d bustrac psql:activities.sql:6: ERROR: invalid
> input syntax for type date: ""
> LINE 2: ...ise. Asked him to call.',''),
>
> Explicitly replacing the blank field ('') with null is accepted. Why is
> this?
>
> Now I know to replace no dates with null I'll do so but I'm curious why this
> is needed.

NULL is nothing.  Blank isn't nothing; blank is a zero-length string.  Thus,
you need to tell Pg "nothing", not "blank string".

(Oracle is really bad about that.)

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