>I mean you can obviously see that "If a field value is included" then it takes precedence over the Default setting. IOW setting DEFAULT to anything in SQL server would not solve his problem. You suggested it though it was obvious. I am saying it is not obvious to every developer as it was oblivious to you.

I suggested to use DEFAULT because I hoped that SQLXMLBulkLoad does not include empty elements into INSERT. I didn't know at the time that SQLXMLBulkLoad substitute NULLs for empty elements.