You can dismiss it as a triviality, but in CS it's always worth considering (what you assume to be) an "identity" value, and its edge cases. Does your DSP algorithm work with near-zero values as well as it does with "true" zero?

(hint: look up subnormal floats.)

I was only dismissing it in the sense that if you were picking a database to use, you'd avoid the "trivial solution" of /dev/null.

>a nice reminder that concepts like ACID don't exist in a vaccuum.

Except if it's in /dev/null?