There should be an option in geodatabases to set the default value to blank. In many cases I do not want to see <NULL> where there is no value. ESRI’s recommended workaround is to select all the <NULL> values and use the field calculator to make the selected values blank with “”. I must now include this workaround into my workflows in order to have a blank record.
Below is an image of road labels. The label is concatenated with prefix direction, street name, street suffix, and postfix directional. There are no values for prefix direction and postfix directional in the two road labels, so ArcGIS labels them with null by default.
I can set the default value to be anything, but not blank. It should take less work to have a record be blank, not more.