SNOW-1510090: Adding support for passing nil to variant columns

[sahilsalim99]

What is the current behavior?

My code
_, err = db.ExecContext(ctx, "INSERT INTO test_variant SELECT ?", nil)

The above results in

Error inserting into Snowflake: 002023 (22000): SQL compilation error:
Expression type does not match column data type, expecting VARIANT but got VARCHAR(16777216) for column VAR_COL

What is the desired behavior?

Being able to pass nil to variant columns while binding

How would this improve gosnowflake?

It would make it easier to work with variant columns.

The current workaround we're making use of involves wrapping it with a TRY_PARSE_JSON/PARSE_JSON :
_, err = db.ExecContext(ctx, "INSERT INTO test_variant SELECT TRY_PARSE_JSON(?)", nil)

[sfc-gh-dszmolka]

hi there - as an alternative, would it be possible to try something like this #831 (comment) ?

[sahilsalim99]

For our use case we do not have info on the data type of the columns we're trying to insert into. Hence it would be great if passing nil to a variant column would work as it does for other data types.