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NULL Parameters

Riley Major turns this T-SQL Tuesday into thoughts on procedure parameterization:

But what if the caller wanted the date to be “empty” (i.e. 1900-01-01)? And what if a NULL is passed?

In our environment, we’ve disallowed NULLs from our table fields. We understand that NULL is actually information– it says that the data is unknown– but we believe that for most data fields, there are non-NULL values which just as effectively represent unknown. Typically, 0’s and empty strings (and the “blank” date 1900-01-01) serve that purpose. And those values are more forgiving during coding (they equal things; they don’t make everything else “unknown”), and we accept the risk of paying little attention to which parts of our logic touched “unknown” values.

It’s an interesting look at dealing with optional and default parameters within procedures.