Yes! I'm agreement... but the truth is you can do with or without them :Whistling:

I know there are people out there investing a lot of time in missinforming good gals and pals but the truth will always prevail - let's go back to the sacred scriptures, in my case - when in doubt - I always go to the old book of Codd.

Firstly... it is not true that Null got invented alongside SQL, Codd described Null. By the way, he got furious when SQL coded a single representation for Null when everybody knows there are two kinds of Null.

Secondly... Codd said "relations have attributes which contain values within a domain" so, lets see what we got here.

a) Null is not a value but the absence of value, domains are made up of values then Null cannot be part of a domain because Null is not a value. As you can see Null gets a free pass.

b) Some attributes in a tuple are not meant to be part of any relationship so people are safe to populate such relationshipless attributes with a Null when needed. Just an example, how about the famous MailAddressSecondLine attribute describing the optional second line of a mail address? you can populate it if needed or you can leave it with no value a.k.a. Null if you have nothing to put in there.

Bottom line is ... Codd invented everything at the same time - including Null - and the model was good but as it happens in all domains of life some people attempts to read what is not there and to stretch the words to extremes beyond what the author intended.

Cheers!