david_wendelken (8/31/2010)
Yep. You can also end up in jail after asking the officer "Is this a joke?" after he informs you your driver's license was suspended almost 50 years before you were born. The suspension date was entered as 11/11/11 and the year was circa 1985, when I was in my 20's. The officer was so stupid he didn't know what he had just said.
I've seen cases where an application required the user to supply a date, and over time they adopted this "work around" process of stubbing something like 11/11/11 when they didn't know what to enter. Of course this was undocumented, and they often forgot to go back re-enter a real date. That's one strong and compelling reason for allowing some columns to be NULL-able. It's fine so long as there is also a column indicating record completion status to prevent half baked data from getting sent to the shop floor or ending up on a report.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho