A report from OpenSQLCamp

Yeah, NULLs sound useful at first, but the only real place where I use them today is for indicating a missing value in a numeric field. For string fields, I find that empty strings are good substitutes for NULLs, and many dates, especially those that mark some start and end epoch can be set to year 0000 or year 9999 initially instead of NULL depending on what is the semantically most useful way to view the value.