>Marc,
>
>Not sure what you mean. My insert for new record is contained in the framework. I just want to prevent the NULL value from being the default. If I use ' ' as the default, it still inserts a NULL in SQL Server???

In an insert statement you don't need to specify all the columns. So when SQL inserts a record into a table, it inserts the values passed. For fields which you didn't provide a value for, it will insert their default values; if no default values, then a null (literally means 'no value' in this case). Now if you have a field which is set as 'not null' and has no default value in SQL, what is the server to do? You are not sending a value, you have forbidden nulls, you haven't provided a default value. It errors out.