I have to agree. I'm stuck between option 2 & 3 (with occasional forays into 4). Since defaults aren't readily visible to the developers working on stored procs and since you can easily override defaults, enforcement is a bear. We've got well over 100 developers, the majority creating stored procs on various projects. There are seven of us checking on them. Getting them to use good joins, reference the covering index or clustered index, avoiding LIKE & NOT IN & UNION ALL & DISTINCT... This is where we get the biggest wins over all. It's a shame there wasn't a way (short of masking tables with views or something) to optionally disallow inserts to columns that have a default value specified.