Maybe you are both right. I agree that his code should be more robust, but since we don't know what data is supposed to be in the column, he might also be right that '' is not an acceptable value.

If I were to write code that extracts values from a database, I'd try it to make it as robust as possible. I would do input validation, and I would probably die (or otherwise warn) if the input is incorrect. And then I would complain by the person responsible for the database. Because while my program deals with the illegal value gracefully, another program may not.

But then again, '' might be an acceptable value; as I said, I don't know what the columns represent.

Abigail