This morning, while sipping my Raktajino, I reviewed President Trump's recent address to Congress. He claimed that millions of centenarians - some purportedly as old as 150 - are receiving Social Security benefits. Let's discuss...

First of all, this is not a political post. I try to avoid bringing politics into my teaching whenever possible because I do not want to alienate anyone. Mistakes like this can happen no matter which party is in charge. This is not about Democrats or Republicans. This is a database post.

The real story here is not fraud or corruption. It is a database design problem.

These ridiculous birthdates are the result of placeholder values used in the system. When the Social Security Administration does not have a date of birth for someone, instead of leaving it blank, they used a placeholder date. One commonly used is May 20, 1875. This goes back to an old ISO 8601 convention that, for unknown dates, systems would use a specific value as a filler. So now, when they pull up records, it looks like there are people who are 150 years old still collecting benefits.

This is not a good practice. As any of you who follow my lessons know, I am a big fan of leaving unknown values as null in Microsoft Access databases. Null means "I do not know." It is much better to leave a date field null than to use something like 1/1/1900 or some other fake value. That way, when you run reports, you can clearly filter out the unknowns. You do not end up with crazy data making it look like someone is still cashing checks from the Rutherford B. Hayes administration.

And before you ask, "what happens if I have to perform calculations on a null date?" The answer is: you handle it. You check for nulls in your queries and formulas. That is much cleaner than filling your table with bad data just to avoid nulls. Remember what I said way back in Access Beginner 1: "NO data is better than BAD data." That's data with a lowercase "d." We don't need crazy androids causing mischief.

So the real lesson here is this. If the Social Security Administration had used nulls instead of placeholder dates, we would not have 150-year-old people throwing off the reports. This is why good database design matters.

Your thoughts?

Live long and prosper.
RR