Re: SET within a function?

An issue is that I am trying to avoid having another table (to stop the
need for a join (performance reasons)). The NULLs are relatively rare, but
since they can appear, and in certain pathological cases the sequential
scan can take seconds to run, I was hoping for a work-around. But it looks
like I have no real choice in this as there is no way to specify that
NULL == NULL.

Another question: if I have a multi-column index, and one of the values of
a tuple is NULL, is that row not indexed? If it is, how does this jibe
with the "NULLs are not indexed" statements?

Thanks!
Ed

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Mike Mascari wrote:

> Edmund Dengler wrote:
>
> > Is the rewrite only for the literal 'X = NULL' or will it do a test
> > against a value such as 'X = OLD.X' (and rewrite is OLD.X is NULL)?
>
> It is a parse time transformation:
>
> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&frame=right&th=26ef31219ae11442&seekm=3DF52206.5060507%40mascari.com#link6
>
> > Is there any way to match NULLS to each other (as I am looking for a
> > literal row, not using NULL as the UNKNOWN). I suppose I could put in a
> > dummy value for the 'Not a valid value', but it seems to be quite awkward
> > when I really do want the NULL.
>
> Normalization would have you eliminate the NULL by having another
> relation whose candidate key is the same as your original table, but
> those records whose attribute is NULL would simply not be present in
> the child table.
>
> Another possible solution is to define your own type with an internal
> status for 'Not a valid value'...
>
> HTH,
>
> Mike Mascari
> mascarm(at)mascari(dot)com
>
>
>