I'm saying that a user entry will always have a user_id. If it's not there, then we can assume that it's an error.

ok, imagine we're doing some cleanup workflow and we want to make sure a user with username foo was deleted by calling this function. in this scenario, Ok(None) is the most appropriate return value, hence the Option within the Result.

maybe i'm not fully understanding your point... we can discuss over Comm if that's the case

Maybe you already discussed this elsewhere, just wanted to put my point here

My reasoning of such cases is:

• If there's a legit possibility of having table entry without user_id (e.g. the user was deleted or sth), returning None is OK - the caller will decide what to do
• If all entries always must have the user_id, lack of this field means database inconsistency/corruption, then an error should be thrown.

We could just use the username_available method in that case, and we don't have to deal with ternary logic.

Seems like are trying to find a problem for a potential solution.