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• What should happen at the start of a software project startup?

  - by Willem

  A quick introduction My college semesters include a 8 week project working for an actual company with a software need in order to get some much needed practical experience. I have just started such a project with 5 other students. We're required to spend roughly 40 hours a week per student on this project. We're working with SCRUM as the software development method, this was assigned by our teachers. The question Day one of the project just ended which has created some questions for me as to how to start a project in the 'real world'. Our first day included working on a project planning document (not sure what the English term is), creating a appointment with the company for an introduction and the opportunity to start specifying the requirements and setting up some standards for the behavior within the group. However these items didn't take that long to finish. We've made some concrete plans for tomorrow and the day after we'll meet the company. This still leaves several hours of 'work-time' unspent. Is it usual not being able to fill every hour of a day for work at the start of a project or are we simply too inexperienced to see what work needs to be done at this stage of a project, or are we, perhaps, going through the above list too fast? How does this work in the 'real world'? Do you spend your time wondering 'what should I do now', or do you have a clear view of what you're supposed to do at that moment?

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• How to write functionally in a web framework

  - by Kevin Burke

  I love Rich Hickey, Clojure and Haskell and I get it when he talks about functions and the unreliability of side-effecting code. However I work in an environment where nearly all the functions I write have to read from the database, write to the database, make HTTP requests, decrement a user's balance, modify a frontend HTML component based on a click action, return different results based on the URI or the POST body. We also use PHP for the frontend, which is littered with functions like parse_str(), which modifies an object in place. All of these are side-effecting to one degree or another. Given these constraints and the side-effecting nature of the logic I'm coding, what can I do to make my code more reliable and function-able?

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• Is it dangerous to substitute unit tests for user testing? [closed]

  - by MushinNoShin

  Is it dangerous to substitute unit tests for user testing? A co-worker believes we can reduce the manual user testing we need to do by adding more unit tests. Is this dangerous? Unit tests seem to have a very different purpose than user testing. Aren't unit tests to inform design and allow breaking changes to be caught early? Isn't that fundamentally different than determining if an aspect of the system is correct as a whole of the system? Is this a case of substituting apples for oranges?

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• How to diagram custom programming languages, non textual?

  - by Adam

  I've used and created domain-specific languages before, plenty of times (e.g. using yacc/lex). Normally we'd start with grammar written in BNF, and a bunch of keywords. This is easy to do, easy to share. Recently, I've started working with diagrammatic programming languages - closest parallel is circuit-diagrams in electronics, where it's very difficult to express ideas in text, but very easy to express them in wiring-diagrams. This is a new and novel problem for me: how to efficiently express these mini-languages, and share concepts in them with colleagues? (i.e. how to whiteboard-program within them. Actual programming is easy - you have physical components to hand) Are there tools for this? Or good/best practices (e.g. equivalent of "always use BNF as starting point for your new DSL, and use tools like yacc to generate the parser, compiler, etc"). My googlefu is proving weak - all I get is false positives for wiring diagrams, and UML editors (since these are custom languages, UML doesn't seem to help)

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• Having a generic data type for a database table column, is it "good" practice?

  - by Yanick Rochon

  I'm working on a PHP project where some object (class member) may contain different data type. For example : class Property { private $_id; // (PK) private $_ref_id; // the object reference id (FK) private $_name; // the name of the property private $_type; // 'string', 'int', 'float(n,m)', 'datetime', etc. private $_data; // ... // ..snip.. public getters/setters } Now, I need to perform some persistence on these objects. Some properties may be a text data type, but nothing bigger than what a varchar may hold. Also, later on, I need to be able to perform searches and sorting. Is it a good practice to use a single database table for this (ie. is there a non negligible performance impact)? If it's "acceptable", then what could be the data type for the data column?

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• MVC + 3 tier; where ViewModels come into play?

  - by mikhairu

  I'm designing a 3-tiered application using ASP.NET MVC 4. I used the following resources as a reference. CodeProject: MVC + N-tier + Entity Framework Separating data access in ASP.NET MVC I have the following desingn so far. Presentation Layer (PL) (main MVC project, where M of MVC was moved to Data Access Layer): MyProjectName.Main Views/ Controllers/ ... Business Logic Layer (BLL): MyProjectName.BLL ViewModels/ ProjectServices/ ... Data Access Layer (DAL): MyProjectName.DAL Models/ Repositories.EF/ Repositories.Dapper/ ... Now, PL references BLL and BLL references DAL. This way lower layer does not depend on the one above it. In this design PL invokes a service of the BLL. PL can pass a View Model to BLL and BLL can pass a View Model back to PL. Also, BLL invokes DAL layer and DAL layer can return a Model back to BLL. BLL can in turn build a View Model and return it to PL. Up to now this pattern was working for me. However, I've ran into a problem where some of my ViewModels require joins on several entities. In the plain MVC approach, in the controller I used a LINQ query to do joins and then select new MyViewModel(){ ... }. But now, in the DAL I do not have access to where ViewModels are defined (in the BLL). This means I cannot do joins in DAL and return it to BLL. It seems I have to do separate queries in DAL (instead of joins in one query) and BLL would then use the result of these to build a ViewModel. This is very inconvenient, but I don't think I should be exposing DAL to ViewModels. Any ideas how I can solve this dilemma? Thanks.

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• What's the most useful 10% of UML and is there a quick tutorial on it?

  - by Hanno Fietz

  I want my scribbles of a program's design and behaviour to become more streamlined and have a common language with other developers. I looked at UML and in principle it seems to be what I'm looking for, just way overkill. The information I found online also seems very bloated and academic. Is there a no-bullshit, 15-minutes introduction to the handful of UML symbols I'll need when discussing the architecture of some garden variety software on a whiteboard with my colleagues?

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• Discussion of a Distributed Data Storage implementation

  - by fegol

  I want to implement a distributed data storage using a client/server architecture. Each data item will be stored persistently in disk in one of several remote servers. The client uses a library to update and query the data, shielding the client from its actual location. This should allow a client to associate keys (String) to values(byte[]), much as a Map does. The system must ensure that the amount of data stored in each server is approximately the same. The set of servers is known beforehand by other servers and clients. Both the client and the server will be written in Java, using sockets, threads, and files. I open this topic with the objective of discussing the best way to implement this idea, assuming simplicity, what are the issues of this implementation, performance measurements and discussion of the limitations.

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• How do I make money from my FOSS while staying anonymous?

  - by user21007

  Let's say that: You have created a FOSS project that other people find useful, perhaps useful enough to donate to or pay for modifications to be done. It is a perfectly legitimate and innocuous software project. It has nothing to do with cryptography as munitions, p2p music, or anything likely to lead to a search warrant or being sued. You want your involvement to stay anonymous or pseudonymous. You would like to receive some money for your efforts, if people are willing. Is that possible, and if so, how could it be done? When I talk about anonymity, I realize that it is necessary to define the extent. I am not talking about Wikileaks style 20 layers of proxies worth of anonymity. I would expect a 3 letter agency to be able to identify the person easily. What is wanted is shielding from commercial competitors or random people, who would not be expected to be able to get the financial intermediary to divulge your details just by asking for them. Why would you want to stay anonymous? I can think of several valid reasons, maybe you operate a stealth mode startup and don't want to give your competitors clues as to the technology you are using. Maybe it is a project that has nothing to do with your daily job, is not developed there, but the company you work for has an unfair (and possibly unenforceable) policy stating that any coding you do is owned by them. Maybe you just value your privacy. For what it's worth, you intend to pay the relevant taxes in your country on any donations.

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• Spreadsheet or writing an application?

  - by Lenny222

  When would you keep simple to medium-complex personal calculations in a spread sheet (Excel etc) and when would you write a small program or script for it? For example when you want to calculate what size of mortgage you can afford to buy a house. I could create a spreadsheet and have a nice tabular representation. On the other hand, if i would write a small script in a nice language (in my case Haskell), i'd have the security of a nice type system, preventing typos etc. What are the pro/cons in your opinion?

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• QA - Developer communication

  - by exiter2000

  I am a developer and have worked at this company 4~5 years by now. We have been practicing scrum for about 2 years. I think, I have been worked well with QAs. I believe QAs/developers/technical writers are all one team. We are also actively hiring new team members. As a legacy member of the team, I have faced to assist new member(including developers and testers) with my business knowledge. We work on 2 weeks base scrum. I usually deliver my user story completely by the first date of second week and do some qa build with partial functionality of my user story so that QA has a good idea about my implementation and flow. Recently, I have met some QAs. In first week, the QAs do not talk... In stand up meeting, they say they are developing test cases regardless I deliver the user story or not. In second week, I do not have a single defect till Thursday afternoon and suddenly I have a major defect with several minor UI defect, which I delivered one week ago. Or I have one or two minor defects on second week however major defects on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. This eventually make the story rolls over to the next sprint. Major defect takes time to fix and more importantly it would trigger the regression test for the story... Even if I worked Thursday evening and fixed it, the testing will not finish. And this happens multiple times with certain QAs. As a same team member, I talked to the QAs if they could test major defect with higher priority... Rejected... Because I do not understand QA process.. So I asked roughly how many major test cases are covered so far in the stand up meeting on 2nd week Wednesday.. The response is I should not ask this to the QA in the stand up meeting... What do I do?

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• How necessary is it to learn JavaScript before jQuery?

  - by benhowdle89

  In my opinion, when I looked at JavaScript, it looked like not my cup of tea. When I came across jQuery, I loved it. I sat and watched Nettuts+ 15 days of jQuery screencasts, 1 year later and now I'm fairly confident I wouldn't develop a website without including jQuery's library. I have never felt this has held me back but my question is, will this come back and bite me in the ass one day, the fact that I didn't have a solid JavaScript foundation before jumping feet first into one of its best (if not the best) frameworks? Did anyone else take this approach?

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• How does PHP5 fare with the earlier versions of the language

  - by Pankaj Upadhyay

  Many times, I like to learn PHP for web development but been drawn back due to comments like the following :- (Comments are just for reference and does not invite Flame-war) "PHP is good but generates spaghetti code" "PHP is nice but Python is marriage material" "PHP lags stuff that you get in other languages like C# or JAVA" But for PHP5 i have seen some promising comments. So, What my question is how does PHP5 fare with the earlier versions of the language and is it good enough now to learn for web development. NOTE:- No comparison of PHP with other languages is sorted here. Please comment just on PHP and it's comparison with itself

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• Best practice Java - String array constant and indexing it

  - by Pramod

  For string constants its usual to use a class with final String values. But whats the best practice for storing string array. I want to store different categories in a constant array and everytime a category has been selected, I want to know which category it belongs to and process based on that. Addition : To make it more clear, I have a categories A,B,C,D,E which is a constant array. Whenever a user clicks one of the items(button will have those texts) I should know which item was clicked and do processing on that. I can define an enum(say cat) and everytime do if clickedItem == cat.A .... else if clickedItem = cat.B .... else if .... or even register listeners for each item seperately. But I wanted to know the best practice for doing handling these kind of problems.

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• Is it okay to call exception-triggered debugging "post-mortem debugging"?

  - by cool-RR

  I heard the term "post-mortem debugging", and Wikipedia says it's debugging done after the program has crashed. I often debug Python apps using a debugger that stops execution once an important-enough exception has been raised. Then I can use the debug probe to investigate. Does this count as "post-mortem debugging"? Because the program doesn't really crash. EDIT: If the answer is no, then what name would you use for the kind of debugging that I described?

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• Best solution for getting referral information in PHP

  - by absentx

  I am currently redoing some link structuring on a website. In the past we have used specific php files on the last step to direct the user to the proper place. Example: www.mysite.com/action/go-to-blue.php or www.mysite.com/action/short/go-to-red.php www.mysite.com/action/tall/go-to-red.php We are now restructuring to eliminate the /short/ or /tall/ directory. What this means is now "go-to-blue.php" will be doing some extra processing to make sure it sends the visitor to the proper place. The static method of the past was quite effective, because, well, if they left from that page we knew we had it right. Now since we are 301 redirecting action/short/go-to-red.php to just action/go-to-red.php it is quite important on "go-to-red.php" that we realize a user may have been redirected from /short/ or /tall/. So right now I am using HTTP_REFERRER and of course in my testing that works fine, but after a lot of reading it is clear that this is not a solid solution, so I was starting to brainstorm on other ways to check and make sure we get the proper referral information. If we could check HTTP_REFERRER plus some other test, I would feel confident we have a pretty good system in place to send the visitor to the right place. Some questions/comments: Could I use a session variable or a cookie to accomplish this goal? If so, would that be maintained through the 301 redirect? I don't see why it wouldn't be.. Passing the url in the url is not an option in this case.

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• Can Clojure's thread-based agents handle c10k performance?

  - by elliot42

  I'm writing a c10k-style service and am trying to evaluate Clojure's performance. Can Clojure agents handle this scale of concurrency with its thread-based agents? Other high performance systems seem to be moving towards async-IO/events/greenlets, albeit at a seemingly higher complexity cost. Suppose there are 10,000 clients connected, sending messages that should be appended to 1,000 local files--the Clojure service is trying to write to as many files in parallel as it can, while not letting any two separate requests mangle the same single file by writing at the same time. Clojure agents are extremely elegant conceptually--they would allow separate files to be written independently and asynchronously, while serializing (in the database sense) multiple requests to write to the same file. My understanding is that agents work by starting a thread for each operation (assume we are IO-bound and using send-off)--so in this case is it correct that it would start 1,000+ threads? Can current-day systems handle this number of threads efficiently? Most of them should be IO-bound and sleeping most of the time, but I presume there would still be a context-switching penalty that is theoretically higher than async-IO/event-based systems (e.g. Erlang, Go, node.js). If the Clojure solution can handle the performance, it seems like the most elegant thing to code. However if it can't handle the performance then something like Erlang or Go's lightweight processes might be preferable, since they are designed to have tens of thousands of them spawned at once, and are only moderately more complex to implement. Has anyone approached this problem in Clojure or compared to these other platforms? (Thanks for your thoughts!)

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• How is intermediate data organized in MapReduce?

  - by Pedro Cattori

  From what I understand, each mapper outputs an intermediate file. The intermediate data (data contained in each intermediate file) is then sorted by key. Then, a reducer is assigned a key by the master. The reducer reads from the intermediate file containing the key and then calls reduce using the data it has read. But in detail, how is the intermediate data organized? Can a data corresponding to a key be held in multiple intermediate files? What happens when there is too much data corresponding to one key to be held by a single file? In short, how do intermediate partitions differ from intermediate files and how are these differences dealt with in the implementation?

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• How often is your "Go-To" language the same as your favorite??

  - by K-RAN

  I know that there's already a question asking for your favorite programming language here. I'm curious though, what's your go-to language? The two can be very different. For example, I love Haskell. I learned it this past semester and I fell in love with it's very concise solutions and awesome syntax (I love theoretical math so something like fib = 1 : 1 : [ f | f <- zipWith (+) fibSeq (tail fibSeq)] makes my inner mathematician and computer scientist jump with joy!). However, the majority of my projects for classes and jobs have been in C/C++ & Java. As a result, most of the time when I'm testing something like an algorithm or Data Structure I go straight to C++. What about you guys? What languages do you love and why? What about your go-to language? What language do you use most often to get things done for work or personal projects and why? How often does a language fall into both categories??

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• Should the syntax for disabling code differ from that of normal comments?

  - by deltreme

  For several reasons during development I sometimes comment out code. As I am chaotic and sometimes in a hurry, some of these make it to source control. I also use comments to clarify blocks of code. For instance: MyClass MyFunction() { (...) // return null; // TODO: dummy for now return obj; } Even though it "works" and alot of people do it this way, it annoys me that you cannot automatically distinguish commented-out code from "real" comments that clarify code: it adds noise when trying to read code you cannot search for commented-out code for for instance an on-commit hook in source control. Some languages support multiple single-line comment styles - for instance in PHP you can either use // or # for a single-line comment - and developers can agree on using one of these for commented-out code: # return null; // TODO: dummy for now return obj; Other languages - like C# which I am using today - have one style for single-line comments (right? I wish I was wrong). I have also seen examples of "commenting-out" code using compiler directives, which is great for large blocks of code, but a bit overkill for single lines as two new lines are required for the directive: #if compile_commented_out return null; // TODO: dummy for now #endif return obj; So as commenting-out code happens in every(?) language, shouldn't "disabled code" get its own syntax in language specifications? Are the pro's (separation of comments / disabled code, editors / source control acting on them) good enough and the cons ("shouldn't do commenting-out anyway", not a functional part of a language, potential IDE lag (thanks Thomas)) worth sacrificing? Edit I realise the example I used is silly; the dummy code could easily be removed as it is replaced by the actual code.

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• Should we choose Java over C# or we should consider using Mono?

  - by A. Karimi

  We are a small team of independent developers with an average experience of 7 years in C#/.NET platform. We almost work on small to average web application projects that allows us to choose our favorite platform. I believe that our current platform (C#/.NET) allows us to be more productive than if we were working in Java but what makes me think about choosing Java over C# is the costs and the community (of the open source). Our projects allow us even work with various frameworks as well as various platforms. For example we can even use Nancy. So we are able to decrease the costs by using Mono which can be deployed on Linux servers. But I'm looking for a complete ecosystem (IDE/Platform/Production Environment) that decreases our costs and makes us feel completely supported by the community. As an example of issues I've experienced with MonoDevelop, I can refer to the poor support of the Razor syntax on MonoDevelop. As another example, We are using "VS 2012 Express for Web" as our IDE to decrease the costs but as you know it doesn't support plugins and I have serious problems with XML comments (I missed GhostDoc). We strongly believe in strongly-typed programming languages so please don't offer the other languages and platforms such as Ruby, PHP, etc. Now I want to choose between: Keep going on C#, buy some products and be hopeful about openness of .NET ecosystem and its open source community. Changing the platform and start using the Java open source ecosystem

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• Calculating 3d rotation around random axis

  - by mitim

  This is actually a solved problem, but I want to understand why my original method didn't work (hoping someone with more knowledge can explain). (Keep in mind, I've not very experienced in 3d programming, having only played with the very basic for a little bit...nor do I have a lot of mathematical experience in this area). I wanted to animate a point rotating around another point at a random axis, say a 45 degrees along the y axis (think of an electron around a nucleus). I know how to rotate using the transform matrix along the X, Y and Z axis, but not an arbitrary (45 degree) axis. Eventually after some research I found a suggestion: Rotate the point by -45 degrees around the Z so that it is aligned. Then rotate by some increment along the Y axis, then rotate it back +45 degrees for every frame tick. While this certainly worked, I felt that it seemed to be more work then needed (too many method calls, math, etc) and would probably be pretty slow at runtime with many points to deal with. I thought maybe it was possible to combine all the rotation matrixes involve into 1 rotation matrix and use that as a single operation. Something like: [ cos(-45) -sin(-45) 0] [ sin(-45) cos(-45) 0] rotate by -45 along Z [ 0 0 1] multiply by [ cos(2) 0 -sin(2)] [ 0 1 0 ] rotate by 2 degrees (my increment) along Y [ sin(2) 0 cos(2)] then multiply that result by (in that order) [ cos(45) -sin(45) 0] [ sin(45) cos(45) 0] rotate by 45 along Z [ 0 0 1] I get 1 mess of a matrix of numbers (since I was working with unknowns and 2 angles), but I felt like it should work. It did not and I found a solution on wiki using a different matirx, but that is something else. I'm not sure if maybe I made an error in multiplying, but my question is: this is actually a viable way to solve the problem, to take all the separate transformations, combine them via multiplying, then use that or not?

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• In a multidisciplicary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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• Why use sealed instead of static on a class?

  - by sq33G

  Our system has several utility classes. Some people on our team use (A) a class with all-static methods and a private constructor. Others use (B) a class with all-static methods (these the juniors). On code analysis, (A) and (B) raise warning CA1052, which recommends marking the class as sealed. Included in the MSDN documentation there is the following advice: If you are targeting .NET Framework 2.0 or earlier, a better approach is to mark the type as static. Why does this make any sense? I would have thought the opposite; AFAIK, previous to 2.0 there was no way to mark a class as static.

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• SQL: empty string vs NULL value

  - by Jacek Prucia

  I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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