In the world of computer programming, an edge case is a situation that requires special handling or consideration, possibly even manual

management, despite the rest of the system being highly automated.

One fairly common example of an edge case is a name that is way too long for the form

you're trying to fill out.

This is a pernicious enough issue on

individual forms, especially documents, like driver's license paperwork or bank account applications,

but it's even more troublesome when found in databases, because just a few dominant database

frameworks are used around the internet and on essentially every government and corporate

computer. So if your name happens to be Janice, K. Iana, Iku, Kowak, Hi, He, Ekaona,

E. Hopefully I got that right, which is an actual Hawaiian surname with 36 characters,

and one of them is an apostrophe, you will

very likely have trouble, not just on individual forms, but every computer-based system in existence,

from the DMV to the bank to signing up for social networks. In the case of that particular

Hawaiian surname, the woman was able to petition the Hawaiian government to change their data

entry rules so that her full name could be printed on her driver's license. But again, that

doesn't really help her across essentially every other computer system on the planet. Other edge

cases are less linguistically cumbersome, but even more tricky in a way,

because their issues are less evident, except in some cases to computer programmers,

making them more difficult to predict ahead of time and handle before these database products go to the market.

A woman named Jennifer got married and adopted her husband's surname, null, N-U-L-L, in the process.

Null is only four characters long, but it's also a difficult name to have in the age of digitization.

Because in the world of databases, null is code for nothing here or no data. So it's not a matter of telling the database

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