Re: Patch: FORCE_NULL option for copy COPY in CSV mode

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> I don't see at all that your suggested alternative has any advantages over
> what's been written. If you can say "NULL FOR (foo) as '""' how will you
> specify the null for some other column(s)? Are we going to have multiple
> such clauses? It looks like a real mess.

Basically the CSV files don't have out-of-band NULLs and it's then a
real mess. In the new pgloader version I've been adding per-column NULL
processing, where NULL can be either an empty string, any number of
space characters or any constant string such as "\N" or "****".

I first added a global per-file NULL representation setting, but that's
not flexible enough to make any sense really. The files we have to
import are way to "creative" in their formats.

In my view, we can slowly deprecate pgloader by including such features
in the core code or make pgloader and the like non-optional parts of
external data loading tool chain.

Regards,
--
Dimitri Fontaine
http://2ndQuadrant.fr PostgreSQL : Expertise, Formation et Support