John Mitchell-245523 (1/3/2013)
It might be more efficient to do the update in your staging or output table instead of as part of the transformation. You'll need to test to find out which way is best.Aside from that, my advice is not to do this. NULL means unknown, so to use it to represent a known absence of a value is something of an abuse.
John
I always use the staging as a copy of the original and never ever do anything to the data. That is a concept I hold dear to me. This way I always know exactly what I received from the source data.
In this instance I have discussed address fields so pretty much I am safe that there is not a road called '' - so safe to change to NULL. Would not consider changing the data if there was any meaning to the contents. I am also interested in doing the same with peoples names as '' has no meaning in first, middle or last name. Other data fields I am not to woriied about as a space may have some bizarre meaning and is not used for comparisons and checks.
Thanks
Mark