Thread: Null values where they should not be...HELP Please!!

I am using postgreSQL v. 7.0.2 on RH Linux 6.2 on the server with VB6
Application accessing the DB through postgrSQL ODBC driver v. 6.50.

We have been running one application for a few months now and everything
seemed to be fine and dandy. We are now exploring PG 7.1 and in the process
of dumping the data for upload to 7.1 for testing, we found something very
strange.

- One Table has its default value as false, and has a constraint that it
can't b null, still there are a lot of values that are NULL.

- A serial field supposed to be "not null" also has a lot of nulls.

- boolean fields with default values specified have nulls.

Assuming even that the application is trying to store null where it should
not, PG should raise an error, instead of accepting the same. Anyone
encountered this before? Where should I look for a fix to this particular
problem while we are testing PG 7.1

My thanks in Advance

Sanjay Arora <sk@pobx.com> writes:
> Assuming even that the application is trying to store null where it should
> not, PG should raise an error, instead of accepting the same.

Indeed.  No one has reported any such problem before, AFAIR.  Are you
sure the columns are marked NOT NULL?
        regards, tom lane

Stephen Davies <scldad@sdc.com.au> writes:
> I changed my DDL to make the unique (sequence-based) keys on the tables 
> involved "not null". This sees to have stopped the inserts but has not 
> caused any error messages.

Are you looking for error messages in the postmaster log, or are you
just believing what Microsoft software tells you?

Running the postmaster with query logging enabled (-d2 postmaster
switch) would be even more helpful, since then we could see what these
mysterious queries are ...
        regards, tom lane

This looks a bit like the problem that I raised a few weeks ago.

It seems that either ODBC or MSAccess or (more likely) VB knows a way to 
insert records containing nothing but nulls.

I changed my DDL to make the unique (sequence-based) keys on the tables 
involved "not null". This sees to have stopped the inserts but has not 
caused any error messages.

The database is only acessed via VB and Access. There is no user use of 
psql.

Cheers,
Stephen Davies

On Thu, 03 May 2001 15:36:03 -0400, Tom Lane said:
> Sanjay Arora <sk@pobx.com> writes:
> > Assuming even that the application is trying to store null where it should
> > not, PG should raise an error, instead of accepting the same.
> 
> Indeed.  No one has reported any such problem before, AFAIR.  Are you
> sure the columns are marked NOT NULL?
> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 
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