My intent is not to drive people crazy with this. I'm sorry you feel that way, Scott.

My intent is to see if anyone has been able to or knows of a way to create a global constant variable or use a sql function to determine if a parameter was actually specified or now--I guess exactly what you think SQL cannot do.

As far as using null as the default value, it would only work if we never allow the execution to pass in NULL with the intent to actually set the column value to NULL or use a separate flag for each and every update field, essentially doubling the number of parameters AND make sure that if you pass a parameter at execution to update a column that an update will only occur if you pass the corresponding flag to cause the actual update to occur.

I will stick with the 'magic' value approach and modify the sprocs if the value is not 'magic' enough for now unless there are other folks that have a better approach.

Thanks so much!

Teresa