I really like Pocketbase as a simpler and locally hosted Firebase/Supabase alternative (yes I know Supabase can be self-hosted but its pretty heavyweight) except for one major disadvantage - the lack of a NULL primitive type.
There's no ability to set null as a value of an item despite null being a perfectly valid data type in SQLite (which is what Pocketbase uses).
Having to arbitrarily assign a MAGIC CONSTANT value (like -1 for example) to represent a "lack of information" in a column is kludgy at best, and impossible at worst - e.g. if all floating point values have meaning in a column, you're out of luck. The only workaround is to create an unnecessary additional boolean column isNumFilled to indicate if the data in the numerical column is valid.
Comments
I really like Pocketbase as a simpler and locally hosted Firebase/Supabase alternative (yes I know Supabase can be self-hosted but its pretty heavyweight) except for one major disadvantage - the lack of a NULL primitive type.
There's no ability to set null as a value of an item despite null being a perfectly valid data type in SQLite (which is what Pocketbase uses).
Having to arbitrarily assign a MAGIC CONSTANT value (like -1 for example) to represent a "lack of information" in a column is kludgy at best, and impossible at worst - e.g. if all floating point values have meaning in a column, you're out of luck. The only workaround is to create an unnecessary additional boolean column isNumFilled to indicate if the data in the numerical column is valid.
Yeah that's strange, it's like they heard that null was a mistake and removed it without realizing that it provides a useful function