Well ya, the gotcha here is that '' is a valid "DATE"... and I say that loosely, which equates to day 0 or '1900-01-01'.

Since you do pass a valid "date" value in the insert, then it is used. There's no magic there.

Hope this helps a few more members down the line :P.

Now the real trick, is how do you choose wether to insert the default in your string or a passed value to the stored procedure in that insert statement... can't wait to see how you'll deal with that.