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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-2212?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#action_12536165
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Øystein Grøvlen commented on DERBY-2212:
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Thank you Mike for taking the time to write down your clear thoughts
on the workings of the Derby B-tree. It certainly made it clearer for
me. Your suggestion for how one with a "non-unique" index can still
guarantee uniqueness for non-null keys seems like a very good idea.
However, one will also need to do something to index creation, since a
traditional non-unique index will not flag if there are duplicate
non-null keys. A simple, but not very efficient, way of achieving that
would be a sequential scan at leaf-level comparing neighboring
entries. I do not know Derby's implementation of index creation
well enough to say whether one can easily come up with a more
efficient way.
> Add "Unique where not null" to create index
> -------------------------------------------
>
> Key: DERBY-2212
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-2212
> Project: Derby
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: SQL
> Affects Versions: 10.2.1.6
> Reporter: Oleksandr Alesinskyy
> Assignee: Anurag Shekhar
> Attachments: derby-2212preview.diff, derby-2212preview2.diff
>
>
> Derby prohibits creation of unique constraints on nullable colums (as well if
> only some columns in the constraint list are nullable) and treat nulls in
> unique indexes as normal values (i.e. only one row with null values in
> indexed columns may be inserted into the table). This bahavior is very
> restrictive, does not completely comply with SQL standards (both letter and
> intent) as well as with business needs and intending meaning of NULL values
> (2 null values are not considered as equal, this comparision shall return
> NULL, and for selection criteria boolean null is treated as FALSE).
> This behavior, as far as I can see, is modelled after DB2 (and differs from
> behavior of most other major databases, like SyBase, Oracle, etc.).
> But even DB2 provide some means to alleviate these restrictions, namely
> "UNIQUE WHERE NOT NULL" clause for CREATE INDEX statement.
> It will be very good if such "UNIQUE WHERE NOT NULL" clause will be
> introduced in Derby.
> Regards,
> Oleksandr Alesinskyy
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