Mandatory fields

摘要

In an ideal world the practitioners, educators, and students in a given discipline would share much the same perspectives. In the real world these groups often display a marked divergence. We illustrate this divergence with a study of the usage of mandatory fields in databases, showing that practitioners often end up compromising data integrity by forcing the collection of data that is inaccurate and contrived. We follow the case study with an appeal to database educators to teach their students to give more serious consideration to the choice of mandatory fields.