Re: Blank, nullable date column rejected by psql

On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, Ken Tanzer wrote:

> Just in case you miss this little nuance, you don't necessarily _have_ to
> specify a NULL for that column, depending how you're doing your inserts.
> You haven't show us your table or what INSERT you're using, but all of
> these examples will work, and don't specify an explicit NULL:

Ken,

Well, you've succeeded in confusing me. :-)

This is the table's schema:

# \d activities
                                Table "public.activities"
     Column    |         Type          | Collation | Nullable |  Default 
--------------+-----------------------+-----------+----------+-------------
------------
  person_id    | integer               |           | not null |
  act_date     | date                  |           | not null | CURRENT_DATE
  act_type     | character varying(12) |           | not null | '??'::charac
ter varying
  notes        | text                  |           | not null | '??'::text
  next_contact | date                  |           |          | 
Indexes:
     "activities_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (person_id, act_date, act_type)
Foreign-key constraints:
     "activities_act_type_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (act_type) REFERENCES activityty
pes(act_name) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE RESTRICT
     "activities_person_id_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (person_id) REFERENCES people(p
erson_id) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE RESTRICT

And this is the framwork for adding rows:

insert into Activities (person_id,act_date,act_type,notes,next_contact) values
(

I add values for each column, but if there's no scheduled next_contact date
I left that off. To me, this looks like your second example (with two
columns of values and no date) and I don't see the differences.

Regards,

Rich