At the end of the day a null represents that a piece of data is unknown, it doesn't matter whether that is stored as a null value, some random place...

I believe that Old Hand provided adequate answer in his post 1766165. NullColumn =...

Grasshopper, if the "null" columns are stored in separate tables (6NF?), then a join (left) to build the original table would return nulls for the missing value. I see the...

And processing 100K rows would take minutes with every nullable column is in its own table. That's just crazy. Normalization is not the ultimate goal -- enough normalization, say to...

I am not done 🙂

Not ignoring the logic can be very difficult in practice, indeed. Somebody mentioned adding status columns to describe what is happening with NULLable columns. Here we...

By definition, relations can not 'store' NULLs. A relation is simply a shorthand notation for set of logical propositions, derived from the same logical predicate. Heavy words, indeed. Propositions? "Some...

This should do the trick:

SELECT

CASE

WHEN Field1 >= Field2 THEN

CASE WHEN Field1 >= Field3 THEN Field1 ELSE Field3 END

ELSE

CASE WHEN Field2 >=...