[skissane]

One response to this is issue is a CHECK constraint LENGTH(column) > 0, so you can’t have empty strings.

Rarely do you have a textual database column where the empty-vs-NULL distinction is semantically meaningful in the application domain. Most of the time, either the column value is missing (arguably better represented by NULL) or has a non-blank value. “Present but blank” is rarely meaningful or useful

Sometimes I pair that with (TRIM(column)=column) to prevent leading or trailing whitespace being saved, which also stops all-blank values being saved

This works really well if you have an RDBMS which supports CREATE DOMAIN, so then you can attach these constraints to a user-defined type and don’t have to repeat them for each column, you just set the type of the column to that user-defined type