Andrew,
> FORCE NOT NULL is in any case a fairly blunt instrument - it doesn't
> work for a column of any type that doesn't accept an empty string as
> valid input, such as numeric types.
Con: this allows COPY to produce output which cannot be reloaded into
PostgreSQL.
Pro: there is a lot of extremely broken external software which expects
"nulls" to be expressed as "". This improves compatiblity with them.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com