On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 16:58, squidsrus85 <squidsrus85@...> wrote:

> Hi SET,
>
> Thanks for the detailed explanation on when NULL is not NULL or maybe it is NULL, or...

This NULL behavior wasn't invented by Firebird -- it's just what the
SQL standard defines.

> I have used mailing lists before and found them pretty useless in the scheme of things. You have to search through digests of mixed old and new postings. Also as I said, it is a post and wait thing.
>
> A great example of not using a list was my experience ov the past two or three days on this group. I was able to post multipl questions and get dozens of replies.
>
> With the speed of that my learning curve was drastically shortened and I am now able to build a database with some confidence that a lot of professional touches have been included.
>
> With a mailing list I would still be waiting. I therefore refuse to join mailing lists to perpetuate the slowness and uselessness. {grin}

I'm using this group as a mailing list via GMail.

> I fail to see why Firebird can't have a yahoo group similar to this one. However after struggling with some useless error messages I am fast getting the impression that the Firebird family et al, like to cling to the seeming "magic" of programming. It harks back to the old days when programmers liked to pretend they were a race/breed apart from the normal Man. They "understood" magic.

As Helen said, firebird-support is no different from this one.

> Yesterday afternoon when converting my DBF files to FDB, I struggled with an error message along the lines of,
> "Numerical arithmetic, unknown value or truncated string error"

So you hit the one error message in Firebird which is obscure and
which I don't like either.

> With such a broad span of options it made finding the problem very tedious and time consuming. No record number, no indicated field or data, no indication of where or what caused the error. I wasted an hour trying to figure it out from the Firebird end to no avail.
>
> I went back the DBF program and scanned every field of every record (several thousand) very carefully. It turned out to be ONE integer field in the entire DBF file that was empty (TDBF can be like that  {grin}) instead of containing a zero or a numeric value. I changed that one field to a zero and for a total of two hours wasted time, the error message went away.

At least Firebird complained about it instead of letting you store
data which violates the schema you defined earlier. I prefer that very
much to getting weird behavior at a customer.

> With such esoterica (as perceived by me) and useless error messages (fact), Firebird is not for me. I will try some other SQL systems as I don't believe it has to be this difficult. I see MySQL and PostgreSQL in way more commercial use and maybe that's why. They may be more programmer friendly.

As I said it one error message, the rest should be fine. And good luck
with MySQL, from what I've seen and heard they're not nearly as
consistent and standards-adhering as Firebird. Though I guess they
have more (centralized) documentation about their proprietary
solutions.

I wish you good luck and hope that the other solutions you try are
easier to learn in the beginning and to use in the long term. I doubt
the last part, but that's of course only my opinion :)

Take care,
Markus