Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

Declarative Defaults

A declarative default is a constraint defined as part of the table definition. Using declarative defaults is the preferred method for assigning default values to columns. You can use the CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statement to create a default and assign it to a column. Declarative defaults are assigned to a single column and cannot be reused for other columns in the database. The following example shows the creation of a new column named CustomerType in the Sales Customer table followed by the creation of a new default on that column:

It is important to remember that a default constraint stores the default value only when ...