Troubles with Nulls, Views from the Users

Summary: An empirical survey of practitioners shows NULLs are ubiquitous and SQL's null-handling features cause real-world problems. It argues foundational nulls research misdirected, urging theory-practice bridging and a reorientation of data-management work. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12751
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 5.5319929e-05
Overall Rank: 5,393 | 62.52%
DOI: 10.14778/3551793.3551818

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,781	SQL Nulls and Two-Valued Logic	2023	PODS	4.9227317e-05
8,400	On The Reasonable Effectiveness of Relational Diagrams: Explaining Relational Query Patterns and the Pattern Expressiveness of Relational Languages	2024	SIGMOD	4.5180771e-05
9,855	In-Database Data Imputation	2024	SIGMOD	4.2652623e-05
9,988	On the Vexing Difficulty of Evaluating IN Predicates	2026	CIDR	4.1905499e-05
10,998	Understanding and Reusing Test Suites Across Database Systems	2024	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7	Extending the Data Base Relational Model to Capture More Meaning	1979	SIGMOD	0.0015464728
327	The Ubiquity of Large Graphs and Surprising Challenges of Graph Processing	2018	VLDB	0.00027312381
529	Database Relations with Null Values (Extended Abstract)	1982	PODS	0.00020825533
1,294	Incomplete Objects - A Data Model for Design and Planning Applications	1991	SIGMOD	0.0001274686
3,582	Closed World Databases Opened Through Null Values	1988	VLDB	6.9455143e-05
4,757	On Relational Algebra With Marked Nulls	1984	PODS	5.9358967e-05
4,809	Uncertainty Annotated Databases - A Lightweight Approach for Approximating Certain Answers	2019	SIGMOD	5.9035874e-05
5,508	Incomplete Data: What Went Wrong, and How to Fix It	2014	PODS	5.4706858e-05
5,714	ACID: A System for Computing Approximate Certain Query Answers over Incomplete Databases	2018	SIGMOD	5.3591645e-05
5,863	Making SQL Queries Correct on Incomplete Databases: A Feasibility Study	2016	PODS	5.2949117e-05
8,802	Coping with Incomplete Data: Recent Advances	2020	PODS	4.4428211e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
12,967	A Sound and Complete Query Evaluation Algorithm for Relational Databases with Null Values	1988	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
5,508	Incomplete Data: What Went Wrong, and How to Fix It	2014	PODS	5.4706858e-05
6,711	Schema-free SQL	2014	SIGMOD	4.9485222e-05
4,502	Possible and Certain SQL Keys	2015	VLDB	6.1322784e-05
4,150	A Formal Semantics of SQL Queries, Its Validation, and Applications	2018	VLDB	6.4022639e-05
3,582	Closed World Databases Opened Through Null Values	1988	VLDB	6.9455143e-05
6,781	SQL Nulls and Two-Valued Logic	2023	PODS	4.9227317e-05
965	Null Values in Data Base Management: A Denotational Semantics Approach	1979	SIGMOD	0.00014965054
5,863	Making SQL Queries Correct on Incomplete Databases: A Feasibility Study	2016	PODS	5.2949117e-05
529	Database Relations with Null Values (Extended Abstract)	1982	PODS	0.00020825533