Sorry to open an old thread but I'm fishing for some perspective and hope there are pople out there that can help.

I have several inhouse DB's that long ago someone diecided are better off setting to all not null for columns. The way they were able to do this was by setting everything to not null then defining a default value. For numbers they use -1, strings '', and dates 1/1/1900. From a administration point of view and perfromance point of view it's a freakin night mare for me. To do things like add a column to a 120 gig table as not null with a defualt can take hours of downtime, reindexing data takes a day, and statistics on column and therefore optimizer selection well is skewed to say the least.

The other day I put the foot down they were adding a boolean field of sorts of type Char (1) they had it set to not null and populated 'N' as default. I told them no set it null and when you turn it on then update to 'Y'. What if anything is wrong with that suggestion? What are peoples opinions on utiizing fake data as place holders for nulls?

Thanks for the feedback in advance.

MudLuck