To my readers and their families: stay safe!

Note: To demonstrate correctness and stability of a sound foundation relative to the industry's fad-driven "cookbook" practices, I am re-publishing "oldies but goodies" from the old DBDebunk (2000-06), so that you can judge for yourself how well my then arguments hold up and whether the industry has progressed beyond the misconceptions those arguments were intended to dispel. I may break long pieces into multiple posts, revise, and/or add comments and references.

In Part 1 we re-published a reader's comments on "horizontal decomposition" -- Hugh Darwen's proposal on How to Handle Missing Information without Using NULLs relative to our The Final NULL in the Coffin: A Relational Solution to Missing Data;  In Part 2 we re-published Darwen's response. Here's my reply revised for consistency with the current state of knowledge.