>>I agree. The other approach I thought is to enter a "dummy" record with blank entry in the primary table and "hide" it from the user. But maybe I will learn to live (code) with NULLs instead of empty entries.
>
>There're three cases where I find NULLs useful
>- Dates
>- FK
>- The columns where it's important to know difference between "empty" and "unknown" values
>
>>Speaking about triggers. Do I understand correctly that specifying foreign key constraint with cascade option is pretty much the same as used to be done with triggers to update foreign keys?
>
>Yes, FK used to be implemented in SQL Server with triggers up to SQL 2000.
Thank for your help. I agree that NULL is useful in all the cases you mentioned; I just need to reprogram some things to get used to this.
P.S. Something really weird happened to me for the 1st time in all the years I use SQL Server. I just had SSMS crash; never before experienced that. I simply selected to modify one of the tables and it crashed. When I started SSMS again it showed me the files that I can recover (queries). I wonder if this was the issue with SSMS or my SQL Server caused the crash?
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