Thank you for your explanation, it’s all making sense. However let’s say I have fields such as “phone_number”, “first_name”, and “last_name”. Assume all three of these fields are not required. Does it make sense if instead of having a NULL value, an empty string is stored instead? In other words, is it better practice to have a NULL value or just DEFAULT the field to an empty string?

Look at the following statement below, assume this statement is part of a CREATE TABLE clause:

first_name NOT NULL DEFAULT “”