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I disagree. If your system is failing to correctly type check strings during SQL interpolation, you should probably kill it with fire.
I don't disagree... In most cases, it's not your system, though, it's someone else's.
> In most cases, it's not your system, though
You can’t pick and chose whether you own a system or not when presented with an opposing argument. That’s not how this works.
I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…
A very common one at one point was that the CFO shared a first letter of name with his daughter. As I recall, he actually had the email in the usual convention so it's not like his daughter was receiving lots of highly confidential financial info but there was regularly misdirected mail.
> Null Island is the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. Since there is no landmass located at these coordinates, it is not an actual island. The name is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have erroneously been assigned the coordinates 0,0.
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Plenty of systems represent all values as strings, and "null" is the obvious (although probably not the best ) way to represent a null value as a string.
Which systems do this? I could see situations where reading in a text file, you have might assume the value null is not the string "null". I am struggling to think of other situations.
Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?
Any time "$var" is interpolated without check into an INSERT, and any maintainer finds it easier to just check for null as a string rather than ask a DB admin or committee to update the DB after a lot of red tape and risk assessment. So... very often.
Note that when interpolated into SQL, the contents of $var must be surrounded by single quotes, so you end up with `insert into Table (Name) values ('Null')`, which correctly inserts the string "Null" into the table.
If you were to leave off the quotes, you'd get a SQL syntax error for all other people, so that code would never make it into production. E.g. `insert into Table (Name) values (Smith)` is a syntax error.
I have 4 names (two first names and two surnames), pretty common thing in my country. But I've had issues several times when flying because they assume it's two different people? How stupid is that?
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Same, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.
I’ve wondered about this myself, though I only have one middle name. Do you typically enter both middle names into the “Middle Name” form field?
The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.
Same, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.