What about NULL input? Is my warning and promotion to zero-length string for NOT NULL columns OK?
I know I originally floated this idea or one very like it, but I have become convinced it is not a good idea after all. The user might not know or expect that the data file has nulls, in which case promoting the value might not be what s/he expects at all. I think there's a world of difference between the user saying "I know there might be nulls in this CSV column - ignore them" and us doing it automagically and issuing a warning, which might elicit the response "Doh! I wish you'd told me beforehand." If we provide an option to override handling of nulls on input per column, then we can safely fail on encountering an unexpected null, and all the user will have to do would be to rerun the command with the override. Recovering from an unexpected promotion to non-null would be a lot harder.
cheers
andrew
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