Whatever terminology you use, every place you loop through records doing stuff with them, you'll either have to decide what to do with oddly-shaped records or i

Whatever terminology you use, every place you loop through records doing stuff with them, you'll either have to decide what to do with oddly-shaped records or implicitly decide to let exceptions occur at that point. Whereas if PostgreSQL tells you that `user` has a `email character varying(255) NOT NULL`, you can be sure that every `user` does. The only place you need a conditional related to that is when trying to insert an invalid record.